TIPS FOR NEW SWIM PARENTS

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. ...

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...

I work in the IT industry and there are no shortage of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) in our industry. 😄  Swimming also has their fair share of TLAs and if you do become a swimming official (I'll cover that topic later on), you will encounter even more abbreviations. Coming from Australia where we use the metric system (like so many other parts of the world), all of the measurements used in the USA were so foreign to me.  Even after 6 years living in the US, my phone's weather app still displays the weather in Celsius 😊 So when my son participated in his first ever swim meet back in mid-2014, seeing events such as 50 "yards" freestyle was so foreign to me.   As a swim parent, you should be familiar with the below acronyms: 1. SCY (Short Course Yards) 2. LCM (Long Course Meters) 3. SCM (Short Course Meters) You can think of USA Swimming having 2 distinct seasons in a year: a) Short Course season: generally this is from September to March of the following year. The sw...