Flashes of Panic

One of the bright ideas my brother had for this swim meet was the “toughen up challenge.” Last year, this was essentially a sprint meet—I think they called it “the churn”—with all 100s and 50s. This year, he introduced two five-event series: 200y in each stroke, plus a 400 IM, or 50y in each stroke, plus a 100 IM. In each event, times were age-graded (according to the world records in each age group, apparently, but age-grading is a black art to me) and summed. Lowest resulting time wins.

Of the 78 people who entered (nearly 40 deck entries! No wonder we were busy at the start of the meet,) almost half entered one of the challenges. As a result, we had some event imbalances. It’s not unusual to have three or five heats of a 50y race; it is unusual to have four heats of the 200y butterfly.

I had fun with the meet manager software generating the heat sheets, results, etc. This is the same package used for many track meets, and the same one I used for the Amherst Invitational, and there are a number of good reasons. It slurps up results directly from the timing system, it understands all the age groups and paper needed, and it “sanity checks” numbers (if you try to seed someone for one event using a time from another one, e.g. a 50y event using a 200y time, it catches your oversight almost before you do.) There are a lot of annoying UI quirks—a lot of menu items don’t produce menus, but act like buttons, for example, and lots of windows “lock out” other windows until they’re closed—but the things it gets right make people willing to tolerate the quirks.

Swimming has advantages and disadvantages over track racing. One advantage is lap counting; with touch pads at the end of the pool, not only do swimmers get lap times to the 100th of a second, but the timer can see how many laps they have completed and how many are remaining. (The timing system knows the event distance and shows a lap countdown for each lane.) The timer just has to keep an eye on the swimmers to see who misses the pad, which happens sometimes in events with open turns. This can’t be done on the track; you can’t use the camera to clock every lap.

The disadvantage comes from the need to line up every swimmer with a heat and a lane. If someone leaves the meet early, or if you don’t have the time and personnel to enforce positive check-in, you have to re-seed the entire meet if you want to avoid leaving empty lanes for every event that swimmer entered. And re-seeding means everyone who is there gets confused about which heat and lane they’re actually competing in; unlike on the track, the officials don’t take responsibility for getting athletes properly set up for each heat. (There aren’t enough officials.) Swimmers are expected to know their lane and heat, and be there ready to compete, and re-seeds make this difficult for them… so even though we were using seven lanes (with the eighth reserved for warm-up) we had some heats go off with only four swimmers. We probably swam three or four more heats than were needed, just because we couldn’t re-seed to account for no-shows and scratches.

Now Playing: Mercy Of The Fallen from The Beauty Of The Rain by Dar Williams