Having just finished another summer league season of interminably long meets, 4-5 hours each, twice a week (and that's with no rain delays), I was wondering if anyone had good ideas for reducing the time it takes to run a meet. Some ideas I've had are:
1 - only announce event, heat and then full description of that event for the first heat. Subsequently, only announce heats.
2 - have kids on blocks when previous heat finishes
3 - drink more to make it less painful
We had one starter at an away meet who would spend 30-45 seconds after each heat talking to folks before she would get the kids on the blocks. I almost lost it.
In all honestly, any tips would be greatly appreciated.
As anyone who's been reading along knows, meet efficiency is a bit of a pet project for me.
There are really just three basic factors that affect meet length:
* Number of entries
* Time between heats
* Efficiency of each heat
If you only have 1 person in a meet, it's a fast meet! So obviously, if you reduce the number of "splashes", you'll get a faster meet.
The time between heats is critical. For most efficiency, you need to do fly-over starts. If you do that, the most important thing is to have a referee and a starter who can keep things moving. You also need a competent timing person (on the timing console) to keep up properly. At our masters championships, once we get going, we can get things going at around 5-7 seconds between heats. Remember that it takes about a full two seconds between "take your mark" and the starting signal. If you run 60 heats in a session, then every second between heats costs you a full minute on the session. 10 extra seconds is 10 minutes.
But you can only run your heats so fast... you need to make sure each heat is efficient. That means people need to be seeded properly. That means (a) good seed times and (b) no empty lanes.
-Rick
As anyone who's been reading along knows, meet efficiency is a bit of a pet project for me.
There are really just three basic factors that affect meet length:
* Number of entries
* Time between heats
* Efficiency of each heat
If you only have 1 person in a meet, it's a fast meet! So obviously, if you reduce the number of "splashes", you'll get a faster meet.
The time between heats is critical. For most efficiency, you need to do fly-over starts. If you do that, the most important thing is to have a referee and a starter who can keep things moving. You also need a competent timing person (on the timing console) to keep up properly. At our masters championships, once we get going, we can get things going at around 5-7 seconds between heats. Remember that it takes about a full two seconds between "take your mark" and the starting signal. If you run 60 heats in a session, then every second between heats costs you a full minute on the session. 10 extra seconds is 10 minutes.
But you can only run your heats so fast... you need to make sure each heat is efficient. That means people need to be seeded properly. That means (a) good seed times and (b) no empty lanes.
-Rick
