2009 USMS Zone Championships

My ears were ringing a bit... Thanks for the compliments on the NE LMSC SCY Meet. We had our biggest meet ever this year, with 859 entrants, and I think 815 people who actually showed up and swam a race. I haven't seen the size of the Pacific Masters champs this year (not sure the meet is even closed yet), but the NE meet may be the second-largest masters meet this year, after nationals. (We usually flip/flip a bit with the Pacific Masters meet in size depending on the year.) We do hold the meet every year at Harvard. The facility is aging a bit, but it still is (IMHO) the best facility for this meet in the northeast. The only facilities we could even really consider would be the new (or newish now) MIT or BU facilities. MIT offers lots of competition lanes, but overall as a facility, it is a smaller facility. Deck space is much smaller, and MIT's spectator area seats only 400 compared to Harvard's 1200 seats. BU offers 10 SCY lanes to a bulkhead, but with 850 swimmers, they only have 3-4 warmup lanes, which would be very very difficult. So we squeeze as much as we can into Harvard. We have an experienced team that gets us down to 5-6 seconds between heats when we get on a roll. We try to very carefully balance the speed between heats, and also making sure that swimmers have enough time to get themselves set, etc., for a fair start. Our biggest problem to date is our popularity. We closed entries about 5 weeks before the main part of the meet started, and we were still at 859 entries by the regular deadline. We may need to make next year's deadline on January 1. With the numbers we had, we were at the pool from 8:00am warmup until around 7:30pm on the Saturday session. We're not sure what to do with all of the interest. -Rick

My ears were ringing a bit... Thanks for the compliments on the NE LMSC SCY Meet. We had our biggest meet ever this year, with 859 entrants, and I think 815 people who actually showed up and swam a race. I haven't seen the size of the Pacific Masters champs this year (not sure the meet is even closed yet), but the NE meet may be the second-largest masters meet this year, after nationals. (We usually flip/flip a bit with the Pacific Masters meet in size depending on the year.) We do hold the meet every year at Harvard. The facility is aging a bit, but it still is (IMHO) the best facility for this meet in the northeast. The only facilities we could even really consider would be the new (or newish now) MIT or BU facilities. MIT offers lots of competition lanes, but overall as a facility, it is a smaller facility. Deck space is much smaller, and MIT's spectator area seats only 400 compared to Harvard's 1200 seats. BU offers 10 SCY lanes to a bulkhead, but with 850 swimmers, they only have 3-4 warmup lanes, which would be very very difficult. So we squeeze as much as we can into Harvard. We have an experienced team that gets us down to 5-6 seconds between heats when we get on a roll. We try to very carefully balance the speed between heats, and also making sure that swimmers have enough time to get themselves set, etc., for a fair start. Our biggest problem to date is our popularity. We closed entries about 5 weeks before the main part of the meet started, and we were still at 859 entries by the regular deadline. We may need to make next year's deadline on January 1. With the numbers we had, we were at the pool from 8:00am warmup until around 7:30pm on the Saturday session. We're not sure what to do with all of the interest. -Rick