There is a Master's meet in Atlanta this Sunday which starts at 10 AM. I haven't been to one before so I was wondering how long they last and is there a certain order to the events.
Just to throw out some numbers for people to chew over... these are from the NE Masters SCY Champs at Harvard this past March. We had 847 entered athletes entered into 5180 individual events. It was a big meet.
Due to scratches, we ended up with around 5000 (a bit under) individual swims. Out of those 5000 swims, fully 1000 of them were within 1% of their seed time. That's 0.6 seconds per 60 seconds of swimming. That's phenomenal for those 20% of swims!
We had 40% of all swims within 2% of their seed times (1.2 seconds per minute of swimming). That's still fantastic!
What it shows is that lots of people are doing really really well with seed times. We had 6 swims that hit their seed times exactly, to the 100th.
Our worst offender in seed times was in a 50 event, where the swimmer magically dropped 63 seconds from his/her seed time. Argh.
Looking at the top-25 sandbagged entries in the meet, 5 of them came from one person. Needless to say, that person will get extra scrutiny in the future!
We had 627 heats swum in this meet. If you look at each heat, the _AVERAGE_ amount of time between the first swimmer and the last swimmer in the heat was 38 seconds. That's the average.
But, we have to recognize that heat 1 is always a big wildcard. That's where we want the slowest people, so there's always going to be a big spread of times in heat 1. That's where the spread _should_ be.
So if you remove heat 1 of every event from the analysis, then the average drops to 26.5 seconds. So the average heat is sitting there for 26.5 seconds from when the first person finishes to when the last person finishes.
If you add that up over the whole meet (not including heat 1), that adds up to 4 hours and 15 minutes. (If you include heat 1, it comes out to 6 hours, 37 minutes.)
So we're spending a lot of time waiting for all of these heats to finish up due to all of these bad seed times. Now, if all seed times were "perfect", we're not going to get back all of that time. Not all of it. But, if the average dropped to 10 seconds per heat (between first and last, except heat 1), we'd save 2 hours and 39 minutes.
Wouldn't you rather spend those 2 hours and 39 minutes somewhere else besides at the pool? I would.
-Rick
Just to throw out some numbers for people to chew over... these are from the NE Masters SCY Champs at Harvard this past March. We had 847 entered athletes entered into 5180 individual events. It was a big meet.
Due to scratches, we ended up with around 5000 (a bit under) individual swims. Out of those 5000 swims, fully 1000 of them were within 1% of their seed time. That's 0.6 seconds per 60 seconds of swimming. That's phenomenal for those 20% of swims!
We had 40% of all swims within 2% of their seed times (1.2 seconds per minute of swimming). That's still fantastic!
What it shows is that lots of people are doing really really well with seed times. We had 6 swims that hit their seed times exactly, to the 100th.
Our worst offender in seed times was in a 50 event, where the swimmer magically dropped 63 seconds from his/her seed time. Argh.
Looking at the top-25 sandbagged entries in the meet, 5 of them came from one person. Needless to say, that person will get extra scrutiny in the future!
We had 627 heats swum in this meet. If you look at each heat, the _AVERAGE_ amount of time between the first swimmer and the last swimmer in the heat was 38 seconds. That's the average.
But, we have to recognize that heat 1 is always a big wildcard. That's where we want the slowest people, so there's always going to be a big spread of times in heat 1. That's where the spread _should_ be.
So if you remove heat 1 of every event from the analysis, then the average drops to 26.5 seconds. So the average heat is sitting there for 26.5 seconds from when the first person finishes to when the last person finishes.
If you add that up over the whole meet (not including heat 1), that adds up to 4 hours and 15 minutes. (If you include heat 1, it comes out to 6 hours, 37 minutes.)
So we're spending a lot of time waiting for all of these heats to finish up due to all of these bad seed times. Now, if all seed times were "perfect", we're not going to get back all of that time. Not all of it. But, if the average dropped to 10 seconds per heat (between first and last, except heat 1), we'd save 2 hours and 39 minutes.
Wouldn't you rather spend those 2 hours and 39 minutes somewhere else besides at the pool? I would.
-Rick
