Carolina YMCA Swim League

Each year we have a growing number of swimmers participating in our end-of-season championship meet. For the 2002 winter championship we had 240 registered swimmers. The following year we had 371 registered swimmers. In 2008, we had almost 650 swimmers! All of the team representatives agreed that it is no longer feasible to run a meet with this many swimmers using the Friday night and Saturday sessions. Even with a facility as large as Rock Hill, the Saturday sessions are just too long.

There are only two solutions to this problem. We can either reduce the size of the meet, or we can use a multiple full-day format. Reducing the size of the meet means qualifying swimmers using time standards or qualifying meets. This would mean that many of the developing swimmers this league was created to help would not be able to attend the championship meet. Everyone agreed that this is an unacceptable solution.

This leaves us with only one viable option. That option is to extend the sessions over two or more full days. While we considered a Friday and Saturday format, experience has taught us that it is very, very difficult to find enough volunteers and officials who are willing to take a day of vacation to run a meet on a Friday. It is also more difficult for working parents to adjust schedules to attend a Friday meet, and there is also the issue – especially in the winter – of pulling students out of school. For these reasons, we decided to run the next summer and winter championship meets over a Saturday and Sunday.

In order to minimize the impact on Sunday morning worship, we organized the order of events to provide several options for swimmers and their families. First, we set an order of events that we think will result in longer sessions on Saturday and shorter sessions on Sunday. This should allow us to start a little later on Sunday morning. Second, we set an order of events that will provide an option to swim 4 individual events on Saturday so that swimmers can swim their four individual events and one relay without even attending the meet on Sunday. If they choose to swim in a second relay, it would be late Sunday morning or early Sunday afternoon. Finally, we will maintain the age-group sessions with 10 and under swimmers in the mornings and 11 and over swimmers in the afternoons. This means that 11 and over swimmers will not be swimming at all on Sunday morning.

The order of events will be as follows:

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This page was last updated on Tuesday, February 16, 2010