NY Times Sunday article on Susan Von der Lippe

It's good to see "real" people excel. I agree 100%. She's one of the most accomplished swimmers among the Masters, yet one of the most humble. You will never hear her whining about the Swimming World Top 12, and you won't see her throwing a tantrum about All-American lists not appearing in SWIMMER. People who think those things validate their swimming could learn a lot from Susan. :applaud:

I agree 100%. She's one of the most accomplished swimmers among the Masters, yet one of the most humble. You will never hear her whining about the Swimming World Top 12, and you won't see her throwing a tantrum about All-American lists not appearing in SWIMMER. People who think those things validate their swimming could learn a lot from Susan. :applaud: If you're looking for fame and fortune, swimming is the wrong avenue to follow. If you're looking for an avenue in which to pursue some personal achievement goals, welcome.

Swimmer Bill...as I told Mr. Commings this morning, my point in calling out the process of voting by SW is that you sometimes have to look beyond only stats/formulas (fire away Chris!) in deciding things like these awards. I think their putting Laura V on the cover and their promotion of masters is awesome...they just missed the boat on leaving SVDL out this year as they will next year because she won't be swimming in the meets they use to score by. Back when I was part of the panel, we did look beyond stats. We also considered swimmers who primarily participated in open water and long distance events. I fought hard for Wally Dicks, Tom Landis, Greg Shaw, and even you - swimmers who had fewer records and AA's than other swimmers, but whose swims were of exceptional quality. When we did that, people who had more records and AA's whined about not being on the list. As you can imagine, I've seen a lot of that, but never from SvdL.

Swimmer Bill...as I told Mr. Commings this morning, my point in calling out the process of voting by SW is that you sometimes have to look beyond only stats/formulas (fire away Chris!) in deciding things like these awards. Paul, I have been working on a project in my spare time that relates to this. I remembered your post and wanted to show you that statistics sometmies is a good thing! I used the (statistically based!) performance rating system described on www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi and came up with the top 25 USMS swims from LCM and SCM in 2007. To make some attempt to preserve the table formatting, I put it in a text file and have attached it to this message (it works on Notepad for me). It only includes USMS members -- I got the performances from the Top Ten database. Susan does quite well, as you can see. In fact, if you assign points to places (1st gets 25, 2nd 24, etc) and then add them up, you get the following totals Laura Val: 236 Susan Von Der Lippe: 146 Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen: 144 Caroline Krattli: 74 Lois Nochman: 24 Sue Walsh: 14 Rita Simonton: 12 So SVdL comes in 2nd among US women. This omits SCY and non-USMS masters (it wouldn't be very difficult to include the latter, I just hadn't planned on doing so). Still, it is hard to believe that the 2nd best US masters swimmer is not one of the top 12 in the world.

Paul, I have been working on a project in my spare time that relates to this. I remembered your post and wanted to show you that statistics sometmies is a good thing! I used the (statistically based!) performance rating system described on www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi and came up with the top 25 USMS swims from LCM and SCM in 2007. To make some attempt to preserve the table formatting, I put it in a text file and have attached it to this message (it works on Notepad for me). It only includes USMS members -- I got the performances from the Top Ten database. Susan does quite well, as you can see. In fact, if you assign points to places (1st gets 25, 2nd 24, etc) and then add them up, you get the following totals Laura Val: 236 Susan Von Der Lippe: 146 Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen: 144 Caroline Krattli: 74 Lois Nochman: 24 Sue Walsh: 14 Rita Simonton: 12 So SVdL comes in 2nd among US women. This omits SCY and non-USMS masters (it wouldn't be very difficult to include the latter, I just hadn't planned on doing so). Still, it is hard to believe that the 2nd best US masters swimmer is not one of the top 12 in the world. Chris...got any time to help me with my taxes this year?! :) I want to clarify again that I in no way was implying that any of the swimmers selected were not VERY worthy (believe it or not someone told LV that was what I had implied)...my point all along was that something didn't add up if Ms. Susan wasn't included. Thanks for backing up my "gut" feeling and let me know when I can send all my tax paperwork over!