Swim Meet Basics
WHEN DO SWIM MEETS HAPPEN?
Swim meets are on Thursday evenings. We have six swim meets in the season including All City. The meets begin at 6 pm and end around 9:30 p.m d. Swimmers will need to arrive by 4:45pm for warm-ups. The exact times to be at a meet will be sent in a message from the team reps.
Swim Meet:
A swimming competition between two or more swim teams, organized by a swimming organization. Swim competitions are held outdoors. The goal of competing is to complete your swimming event as fast as you can (legally).
Event:
An event is a portion of a meet competition broken down by distance, stroke, age, gender, and relay type. An event is the type of swim race you will compete in. You will typically swim 1-3 events during a swim meet. You will never swim every event in a swim meet. All swim meets number their events, and they typically go in a standard order unique to each swim league. Individual events are seeded fastest to slowest, with the fastest heat swimming last. The youngest age group swims first, with boys preceding girls. With the exception of the 200IM at all non All City meets, which is an open event meaning all groups and ages swim at the same time.
The order of events for all meets will be:
- Freestyle
- Backstroke
- Breaststroke
- Butterfly
- 200 IM – Individual Medley (50 meters each of Freestyle, Backstroke, Breaststroke, and Butterfly)
- Freestyle Relay (four swimmers each swim 50 meters freestyle)
- Medley Relay (four swimmers each swim 50 meters of the four strokes)
Heat:
A “heat” is considered a round/”wave” for each event of a swimming event. How many heats there are in an event will depend on the number of lanes available and how many swimmers are competing in the event. Heats are seeded from slowest to fastest. In each heat, the swimmers with the fastest seed times are scheduled to swim in the middle lanes.
Heat Sheet:
The heat sheet is a list of swimmers and the events they will swim in that meet. Find your child’s name; the list follows the order of events, with the youngest children swimming first in each event and the boys swimming first in all events. Highlight the event number, the stroke, the heat number, and the lane number for your child(ren) to help make sure they are at their events on time. You can also use the SwimTopia Mobile app during the meet, which is an online version of the heat sheet. Download SwimTopia Mobile from the app store.
Seed Time:
The swimmer’s fastest time prior to this meet. Seeding is the method of placing swimmers in lanes in order of their entry times.
Lane Number:
This is your assigned lane in the pool that you will be racing in, during your heat. Typically, the fastest swimmers in each heat get assigned to the middle lanes.
Relay Events:
A relay is typically a combination of 4 swimmers on the same team. Each swimmer takes turns completing parts of the race, typically 1/4 of the total distance. Relays are freestyle or medley (all four strokes). The fastest swimmer is responsible for the last “leg” of the race, and the entire group’s time is the final result of the race.
Long Course (LC) Pool:
A pool configured for swimming with a 50-meter long race course.
IM:
Slang for individual medley, an event in which the swimmer uses all four competitive strokes in the following order: butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle.
Meet Judge:
A judge on the deck of the pool. Various judges or officials watch the swimmer’s strokes, turns and finishes or are timers.
Watch Time:
The recorded time from a watch started and stopped manually by a lane timer.
Disqualification:
Sometimes you will have a swimmer who is DQ’d which means “disqualified”. In this case, the Stroke & Turn judges saw and wrote up an infringement, which is usually an incorrect stroke technique, early start, incorrect turn or incorrect finish. The team coaches go through each DQ and work to correct the problem.
All DQ'd swimmers do not place, count towards team points, or keep that time to qualify for All City or seed times at meets.
