With the continued growth in USMS membership, I would submit that it's time to eliminate the regional teams at Nationals. Case in point: NCMS sent a "team" of 123 swimmers to Atlanta, enough to enter A, B, C, and D relays in many events (e.g. the mens 35+ 200 free relay in which our club team placed 13th behind eight regional teams). It's been argued that the formation of regional teams allows more swimmers to participate in relays, yet local clubs from North Carolina sent as many as thirty or more athletes and could have entered relays on their own as our club (with eight swimmers) did. Swim with the guys you actually train with.
Oh sheez... fine Jim - ruin my reputation on the forum!
Now I'll never have a crack at a spot on the Snotty Forum Poster relay :(
Ahelee! First of all, profound apologies for spelling your name wrong.
Secondly, you are welcome anytime to join the Jim and Rich World 'O Inappropriate Jocularity. In fact, we were kind of hoping to release a calendar...
Who will give me 10 to 1 odds that Rich, at the nanosecond he has a chance to read these recent posts, will throw me completely under the bus, disavow any sort of kinship whatsoever with the type of ribaldry HE INAUGURATED and to which I ONLY RESPONDED and, in fact, recommend that another strike be affixed beside my name on the roster of "three strikes and you're out" life time banning list?
Ahelee, can I put you down as a character reference if, and when, the lifetime banning authorities show up at my door? I am pretty sure that being a medically certified eunuch is a defense for my actions (and yet another reason why I should be allowed to swim in women's non-cheating cheating suits like Leslie, though perhaps this is fodder for another topic entirely.
Oh sheez... fine Jim - ruin my reputation on the forum!
Now I'll never have a crack at a spot on the Snotty Forum Poster relay :(
I'm sure you can step up your game. 50 x WTF or RTSU (refuse to shut up) should help get you in the groove. :)
Wookiee, I am such an agreeable relay teammate that I agreed to swim evil, slowpoke style, on our itsy bitsy team medley relay. But I won't fight Geek for that coveted spot on the Snotty Forum Posters relay.
If we didn't keep team scores at nationals, would we still have regional teams? In other words, is combining for relays as important as combining for team scores?
I'm going to agree with Jim on these points.
I don't really care about scoring at Nationals much. I confess I have no idea who won and didn't listen to the announcement at the end of the meet. I do feel slightly put off by the fact that my little local relays got whomped by the regional teams. But I don't have much desire to swim on a big regional relay team with people I don't know. I enjoy relays. But I like swimming them with either people on my small local team or people I know and like (old friends or new, near or far). If I had to hold out for people I actually "train regularly" with, I would never swim relays since I train mostly solo.
As a swimmer on a regional team, I can honestly say I usually already know all swimmers on my relays. There have been 2 times in the last 4 years that I didn't know a swimmer and then it was an opportunity to meet someone new, who I then got to see at local meets. I train mostly with my local club, and sometimes with the local age groupers (think Saturday AM workouts when they are rarely scheduled), and sometimes with another team an hour and 15 away from me, and I do that if I am coaching masters so much that I'm not getting my workouts in. Relays are always fun. Local team relays are great as well, and it's really fun if we can get a zone record or sneak in a top ten time from our local team.
i had no idea this practice was going on.....
makes me want to stick to OW
Yeah! And I've solved the whole relay problem. On June 12 this year (10 days time), I plan to become the first ever one-person relay to attempt Manhattan Island Marathon swim.
Instructions on how to support this historic venture can be found on my blog at forums.usms.org/blog.php
If we didn't keep team scores at nationals, would we still have regional teams? In other words, is combining for relays as important as combining for team scores?
But the way points are kept now encourages participation. There is no limit to the number of relays and relays are scored with double points. This is a big motivating factor for coaches to get their swimmers out for the big meets like zones and nationals. And it helps make the headache of putting those relays together worth their effort.
we allow UNAT relays to swim (unofficially) at our local meets and they function in exactly this "pickup" fashion. The relays don't count for anything. I wonder if this could be done at nationals with no change of rules at all?
It seems like the only problem would be adding time to an already long meet, but I can't think of an objection to filling any empty lanes. Maybe the policy could be to not combine age groups in a single heat and then have a first come, first serve sign-up sheet for pickup relays to fill open lanes.
i've always thought that "world records" should be set by the fastest swimmers in the world and not restricted to persons who have citizenship of one country or another..... likewise for masters.
(then again.... i don't get all "flag-a-wavin" for the olympics or any other international competitions. thats just me)
To put things in perspective, less than 5% of US Masters Swimmers participate at Nationals. In other words, all the consternation regarding Regional vs. Local clubs, relays, and the like is small potatoes for the vast majority of members. It's not really worth it to get worked-up about these things, the focus should be on how to strengthen masters swimming programs and get more people in the water. If some wish to compete that's great, but what is more important is that swimmers of all ages and abilities find a place where they can get fit, meet new friends, and become better athletes.
Just my opinion on this (over)heated topic :argue:
Swim well my friends...
