How long is a meet?

However, I can't see any reason why you couldn't publish a similar statement on your meet entry form and follow it to change the seed times for the real sandbaggers. We do (have that statement in our meet info). In NE, we've debated having "requirements" of seeding with best times. I'm of the opinion that we need to state that we expect you to seed with best times, and we reserve the right to change if we see fit. It also helps us with the people who quite accidentally seed themselves wrongly. We have bunches of our more "senior and experienced" swimmers who believe they are faster than they are, and we make some adjustments to make sure that the 55-minute swims in the 1650 are all in heat 1. -Rick

Even worse, entering with "no time." Come on, you can at least estimate a time. Presumably you've at least done the event in practice. Our championship meet prohibits NT entries. If you enter with NT, I don't put you into the event until I get a real seed time from you. (And if you're a real pain and don't respond, I do my research and make one up for you.) -Rick

Not to defend the sandbaggers out there, but there are times when I've entred a slower time due to the event schedule. For example, when two events I want to swim are back-to-back (or on either side of events with low participation like the 200 fly or 400 IM). In those cases I will enter a slower seed time for the first event in order to have some rest before the second. It has nothing to do with blowing people away and everything to do with not blowing up myself! We've had people do that, and tell me they're doing that. It's exactly why we put in the anti-sandbagging rule in the first place. The first year it happened, and we got lots of complaints, the people in question pointed out that we never said it was not allowed. So it's not allowed in our meets now. You've seen the order of events. Everyone goes by the same order. If there's not enough time for you between two events, then don't do one of them. If everyone in the meet swam back-to-back events, and sandbagged the first one to get more rest, we'd add piles of time to the timeline. And then those same sandbaggers are going to complain about how long things take. Not to mention the 85-year-old who you run over in heat 1. -Rick

As for the "first in your heat by 30 seconds," there are people out there who know better and purposely sandbag their times just so they will come in first and look good. This bugs me more than almost anything. I'm sorry, but I don't have time for your (that's the "royal your") ego trip at my swim meet at the expense of (a) my timeline and (b) the egos of everyone else. As much as you may get a thrill out of blowing away the person next to you by 30 seconds... that person may be crushed by being blown away by 30 seconds. Sometimes I'm tempted to re-seed the worst offenders into the middle lane of the fastest heat, so they can be blown away by everyone else in the heat and look foolish themselves. We're going to start doing some time reconciliation for entry times for our biggest meets. We're building up enough data in various times databases to be able to electronically detect bad seed times. If you've gone 1:26, 1:28, and 1:27 in the 100 IM for the past three years, you should not be entered at 1:10, and you should not be entered at 1:50. I'm also thinking about possibly creating some sort of award for either or both of (a) best seed times for an individual and/or (b) best seed times for a team. I.e., for each person, add up the total (absolute value) difference between seed time and actual time, probably do a weighting for distance, and then sort. (I.e., 10 seconds off in the 1650 is a whoooole lot better than 10 seconds off in the 50.) Same for overall seed time differential for a team. We had a handful of people at our latest meet that, over a half-dozen individual events, were a grand total of 0.5 seconds off their seed times. That's phenomenal, and these people deserve trophies in my book. -Rick -Rick

Rick, note that article 104.5.5.A.11 of the rule book (page 34) states:"If a swimmer enters a deck-seeded event with a time significantly slower than his/her recently recorded time, the meet director may, after notifying the swimmer, change the seeded time to a realistic time." This is the anti-sandbagging rule that was added for national championships a few years ago. It is in the section that only applies to nationals, and I'm not sure why it only applies to deck seeded events. However, I can't see any reason why you couldn't publish a similar statement on your meet entry form and follow it to change the seed times for the real sandbaggers. Righteous! I love it! Way to go Rules Committee! :bouncing:

Our championship meet prohibits NT entries. If you enter with NT, I don't put you into the event until I get a real seed time from you. (And if you're a real pain and don't respond, I do my research and make one up for you.) Rick, you are awfuly nice to take the time to do the research for those NT people. To your point of using best times, I try to use times from either the same meet or about the same time in the season from the previous year (ie, swim a 53 100 free at zones in 06; enter a 53 for zones in 07). I find it usually works pretty well, and especially if I beat the time, it tells me I am ahead of last year. For the Colonies Zone LCM Championship meet we are hosting, the entry time space is formatted for minutes and seconds (looks like ___:___.___) in order to get a time, though I did note that "No time entries will be seeded in the slowest heat." Hopefully it won't be too big a deal. You coming?

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

Wow Rick! That's dedication! Well, the service doesn't come for free. :-) We have a tradition of a $5 incomplete entry form fee. If your entry form isn't complete, and you end up on my "problem list", then you get charged an extra $5. (It's either that, or I reject your entry completely, and you don't get into the meet.) This includes NT entries, people who enter but aren't USMS registered yet, people who forget to sign their entry waivers, etc. Unfortunately, we find that lots of people are really sloppy with entries. Though this year I rolled out online entries, and almost half of the entries came in that way. (We would have gotten more, but I finished the entry system just a few weeks before the entry deadline.) Next year, we're going to look at tying the online entries to other databases, so that when you enter online, we automatically suggest your entry times for you. Perhaps even requiring a written comment if you put an entry time that is too far off of our suggestion. (Which is definitely going to happen... injuries, pregnancies, other major life events, etc.) We just want people to (a) think about their entries, and (b) understand that it matters and (c) that we're watching. -Rick

One thing that is worth pointing out... one of the major reasons that many masters meets are longer than they should be us because masters swimmers are terrible with seed times. Most masters swimmers enter meets with very rough estimate seed times, and that affects the length of the meet. Even worse, entering with "no time." Come on, you can at least estimate a time. Presumably you've at least done the event in practice. What you end up with is a heat of "NT" swimmers whose speeds are all over the map. If this is a longer event it can significantly impact the timeline.

Wow Rick! That's dedication!