Entering a USA-S meet?

I want to swim a USA-S meet but I want the times to count for USMS, how do I go about doing that at the meet? There are two issues: making sure your Top Ten Recorder knows about the meet (and your times in it) and making sure that the pool length has been certified. For USA-S meets, both are your responsibility. Alerting your TTR is easy enough. Do it before the meet and have him/her check that your pool has already been measured. Here is a reasonably current (updated 4-15-10) list of pools that have been measured for all courses: www.usms.org/.../poollengthdb.xls If your pool has no movable bulkheads and has already been measured, you're in luck. All you have to do is point your TTR to the official posted results after the meet and s/he should take it from there. If the pool hasn't been certified, or has a movable bulkhead, then you'll have to get the pool measured. The form is here and the procedures are on the back of the form: www.usms.org/.../gto_rectab_pool_measurement.pdf Contact the meet director before the meet to arrange to have this done. Usually the aquatics staff will be able to do that for you. Note: if your pool hasn't been certified and you arrange to have it done, send a copy of the form to your TTR and another to Walt Reid, who maintains the national pool length database. He is also the guy who receives record applications so his address is on that application form: www.usms.org/.../gto_rectab_record_application.pdf Good luck!

Just remember, not every pool's aquatic staff is accomodating to measuring the pool. In addition, a meet director could think that you are crazy when you ask about "measuring the pool". When I go to USA-S meets, I sometimes have to bring my steel tape with me. This has been my experience in the Northeast. Cali could be a very acoommdating, pool measuring place.

Karen, Or, you can do what I did: enter a USAS meet, don't do anything about pool measurement, and then swim slow enough so that you no longer care about TT recording!:badday: On a serious note, thanks Karen for asking and Chris for responding, as I hope to swim better in a mid-July USAS meet. I'll take steps as described.

Yes, thank you Karen for asking and Chris for responding. I'm in my first USA-S meet in a long time soon and I would like for it to be submitted (if it's good enough). Now I have some work to do :)

I don't know if the pool is short or not but I bet Chris is correct: they simply haven't measured it. USA-S only requires a pool measurement if a record is set (NAG, for instance). And they probably figure NAG records won't be set in this particular meet so they haven't bothered to get the pool certified. For USMS, however, the pool must be certified for the times to be eligible for Top Ten consideration. But keep in mind you can ask to have the times submitted to USMS Event Rankings since those times are not tied in to the Top Ten rankings. It's a little bit of work to extract the times from a USA-S meet to import into our database but it can be done. That's why you have to be nice to your local Top Ten recorder. But in this case you're not turning your times in for TT so I suppose any USMS administrator with access to Event Rankings can do the work for you. Which means you should be nice to all of those people :D Thanks Jeff and Chris. I will contact the meet director and see what is up with this pool. Since I might be having surgery in Aug, this might be one of only 2 LCM meets I get in this summer. Oh and I am always nice to my Top 10 person. I even took a lovely picture of him at Nationals :) What's even better than beating the "young" kids is when you lap them! I was entered in a USA-S meet with NT for the 200 IM. They threw me in a heat with times that were about 15 sec above my time. I lapped one girl and came in 1st in my heat :)

That's why you have to be nice to your local Top Ten recorder. It looks like my events are in from last weekend but the times did not make it- do you need some more cookies?

It looks like my events are in from last weekend but the times did not make it- do you need some more cookies? The USMS database can't extract Prelim times out of the Hytek results file - it only sees Finals or Timed Finals swims (hence my Finals time is posted even though my Prelim swim was slightly faster). Chris Stevenson sent me the SDIF spec so I can manually edit the results file to put your times in there, but it is not straighforward and I haven't had time this week to tinker. Below is the spec in case you want to build the results file. It is interesting reading material :confused:: www.usms.org/.../sdifv3f.txt I'm just kidding about asking you to do it. I can work on it and it is indeed on my to-do list.

What format do the results need to be in to be easily ingestible by USMS? SDIF or Commlink (CL2). But they have to be coded as Timed Finals or Finals in the results file. What I'll probably end up doing is cloning the Meet Manager file and manually entering times done in Prelims as being Timed Finals and then I'll export a new results file. Or just entering the swimmers into an empty lane in finals and typing in their results data from Prelims. These seem easier than editing the commlink file.

I can work on it and it is indeed on my to-do list.There is certainly no rush.

Chris, I'm hoping you or someone else who knows, can answer this, this is my meet entry www.pvswim.org/.../10-64ma1.htm It says the pool has not met USA-S standards for pool measurement for their rule Dimensional Tolerance: Against the required length, a tolerance of plus (+) 0.03 meters (1 and 3/16ths of an inch) in a vertical plane extending 0.3 meters (12 inches) above and 0.8 meters (2 feet, 7 and 1/2 inches) below the surface of the water at all points of both end walls. Should I even bother to ask for USMS measuring or just use this as a warm up for my USMS LCM meet coming up?