TIPS FOR NEW SWIM PARENTS

As your child continues with their swimming journey into high school, it may become a natural thought process to start exploring the possibility of continuing to swim in college as well.    Some swimmers (and parents) may think of swimming as a platform to get into their dream college and incorrectly assume it can lead to a full-ride athletic scholarship.    So, can swimming really help a student-athlete to be admitted to their dream college?    Possibly, yes – it could indeed be a factor that could help the student’s case for college admission, but it should not be relied upon as the “only” factor.    As for a full-ride athletic scholarship in swimming, I would say the answer would be a “no” in most cases. <Royalty free image from Pexels > Full-ride athletic scholarships are generally offered to what is called a “headcount” sport.  A “headcount” sport generally produces a lot of revenue for the university and examples include sports...

One of the surprising differences I have noticed about kids’ activities in the US compared to Australia is the higher level of parent involvement that is required (or in some cases, even expected of).   Swimming is not an exception to that.   At least within most of the swim clubs in Texas that I have seen, there seems to be a certain requirement of volunteer hours that each family needs to do for the club.   Volunteering can be a great way to ensure your kids can continue to do the sport that they like, and it can also be a great way for parents to get to know other parents in the swim club. One of the most common “duty” that a swim parent may have to do is to work as a “timer” during the swim meet.   If there are 8 lanes in a pool, you will need at least 8 timers.   I say “at least”, because in most meets, you normally require two timers per lane. If your swim club is hosting a meet, they will probably be required to fill the timer slots with parents from ...

In most of the Timed Final Meet s or during the Preliminaries where there are multiple heats for an event, the usual order is fastest to slowest heats (i.e. swimmers in Heat 1 are faster than those in Heat 5).  Each swimmer is seeded according to their previous best time.  If it's an event that the swimmer has never previously acquired a swim time, then the swimmer has a " NT " (No Time) and is usually grouped together in the latter heats with other swimmers who also have a NT. But how do the swimmers get assigned in their lanes for their respective heats? General rule of thumb:  the fastest swimmers are positioned in the middle lanes. Using the information available from 2020 USA Swimming Rulebook   (102.5.3, page 28), I created the below graphical table.  I highlighted two rows in yellow as the 8-lane and 10-lane formats are the most common ones you will encounter (the 8-lane format is most common for the US  SCY ).  <Lane assignments> So ...

I have previously covered various elements of a Prelims/Finals meet in my earlier posts.  One final term I would like to introduce about a Prelims/Finals meet is the " Swim-off ".   A swim-off is required to break a tie for certain swimmers who have finished the Prelims of an event with the same swim time for a certain seeding position. Using an example of a SCY Prelims/Finals meet where the top 16 qualify for the A/B Finals, a swim-off would be required in the following scenarios: a) After Prelims, two swimmers finished with the same swim time for the 8th position.  A swim-off is required to seed the faster swimmer as 8th (& hence qualifying for the A-Final) and the other as 9th (to be assigned to the B-Final) b) After Prelims, two swimmers finished with the same time for the 16th position.   A swim-off is required to seed the faster swimmer as 16th (& hence qualifying for the B-Final) and the other as the first Alternate . c) After Prelims, two s...

There are two other terms you would need to know for a Prelims/Finals meet :  Alternates and Scratching . If your swimmer qualifies for the Finals, the meet announcer generally makes an announcement to call out the names of the swimmers who have qualified and the two " ALTERNATES ".  The meet organizers would also print out the event results and they will be posted on a designated wall within the venue.  Here is the important part:  if for whatever reason your swimmer cannot compete in the finals, he/she  MUST  withdraw (commonly called " SCRATCH ") from the finals  within 30 minutes of the announcement .  Please make sure your swimmer ALWAYS consult with their coach before deciding to scratch from the finals. If you do not scratch and your swimmer does not show up in the finals, your  swimmer will be suspended from the meet  (i.e. unable to compete for any other events in the meet) and also be fined ($50 seems to be the most common...

I have already covered some aspects of a swim meet in my earlier post  where I briefly mentioned the Prelims/Finals meet format, but I thought I would touch upon this a little bit more in detail. USA Swimming's definition of a Preliminary heat (or Preliminaries): " competition in which a number of heats are swum to qualify the fastest swimmers for the Finals ". (USA Swimming 2020 Rulebook , page 17) The most common Finals format I've seen for a  SCY meet would be the A/B Finals format, where the top 16 swimmers from the Prelims qualify (A-Final: 1st-8th,  B-Final: 9th-16th). In a LCM Prelims/Finals meet, you may also see the Top 20 qualifying for A/B Finals as some LCM pools have up to 10 lanes. Normally the B-Final (also called a Consolation Final ) is swum first, followed by the A-Final (also called a Championship Final ).  It is actually pretty cool when you first see your kid qualify for an A-Final, as the meet announcer announces each swimmers individually a...

Before a swim meet, I would highly recommend that you read the Meet announcement document in advance so you can understand some of the basic logistics of how it will be run.  It's not a bad idea to go through it with your swimmer as well so they too are aware of it, instead of trying to figure it out on the day of the swim meet.  The coaching staff of your swim club may probably send out a memo with some of the key points to note about the meet, but don't always rely on that to be the case.  Assume you will need to figure it out yourself. The first picture below is the Texas A&M Student Recreation Center set-up as a LCM pool.  The one below that is the same venue, but set-up as 2x SCY pools during Short Course season.  Do you see the white strip of barrier in the middle that is separating the pool into 2 separate SCY pools?  That is called a " bulkhead " or sometimes called the "turn-end" and this enables the conversion of a LCM pool into 2x SCY pools. ...

I have covered some basic things you need to prepare for your first swim meet in my earlier post .   But here are some additional details of a typical swim meet for your reference. 1. Swim meets are usually held from Friday (late) afternoon to Sunday afternoon.  Friday sessions are usually short, as they generally only have a handful of events (around 4 or less events) and they are usually the longer distance events (e.g. 500 Free, 400 IM).  So if you have a young swimmer, you probably would not attend the Friday session. 2. Swim meets are usually divided into a "session" . For example: a) Friday = Day 1, Session 1 (usually the longer distance events for all age groups) b) Saturday = Day 2, Session 2 (10 & Under) / Day 2, Session 3 (11 & Over) c) Sunday = Day 3, Session 4 (10 & Under) / Day 3, Session 5 (11 & Over) Generally speaking, there is an "AM" morning session and a "PM" afternoon session during the weekends.  The meet announcemen...

When your child joins a USA Swimming Club and is placed in a team, expect to attend a "swim meet", which is usually once a month and each swim meet usually last 2-3 days.  It is basically an event where your local swim club and other swim clubs from the same LSC (still not sure what a LSC is? Check my earlier post here ) "meet" and have their swimmers race against each other in various events.  It also provides an opportunity for the swimmers to put into practice what they have learned during practice in a race format and to obtain official swim times for their events. When I was growing up in Australia, some of the sports-related events were referred to as "carnivals" (e.g. athletic carnival, swimming carnival).  Personally, I think the word "carnival" has a better (more friendly) ring to it and maybe we should look at adopting it in the US as well, especially for swim meets for the younger age group kids 😊 My eldest son was 9 years old when...

After the completion of my son's first Short Course season, the Long Course season started and as a result, our first Long Course swim meet (if you missed my earlier post about what Short Course & Long Course season means, click here ). In the meet announcement, it said that in order to qualify for the Long Course swim meet, the swimmer needed to have "3x B Times".  I remember thinking to myself "What is a B Time?"  I had no idea what they were. 😅 USA Swimming has various Time Standards and the most basic one you should note is their "Motivational Times" for different age groups.  As of writing this post, the current one is the 2017-2020 Age Group Motivational Times, so it has been around for a few years. You could probably find various Time Standards from your local swim club's website &/or from your LSC (Local Swimming Committee) website (my blog post about how USA Swimming is structured into Zones & LSCs can be seen here ). But it i...

Now that you know what is the difference between Short Course Yards (SCY) vs Long Course Meters (LCM) based on my previous blog post , let's have a look at what individual events are available. Free = Freestyle Back = Backstroke Breast = Breaststroke Fly = Butterfly IM = Individual Medley Swimmer does all of the 4 strokes, in the order of Fly → Back → Breast → Free. 100 IM is only available for the younger age groups (10 & Under and 11-12 years) and for obvious reasons, it is only available in the SCY format (LCM pools are 50 meters in length, so the minimum distance for an IM would be 200-meters). If you would like to know the finer details of what is a "legal" stroke, you could refer to USA Swimming's rulebook (this is the same rulebook that the Swim Officials refer to). The 2020 rulebook can be seen here  - pages 19-23 shows what is a legal start, stroke, turn & finish for each of the events.  Although I have not listed it above (as it's not offi...