Osprey Aquatics—It's About Time

It's About Time(s)—The Scoop on Swimmers' Times

by Phil Sheridan

If you talk to someone about swimming, it's impossible to go more than a few seconds into that discussion without mentioning a swimmers "times". Time is the numeric yardstick by which we measure a swimmers performance and progress and this necessitates keeping track of each swimmers individual performances and tracking those results throughout their swimming life. At Osprey we focus on a variety of other factors besides time(s) that we hope will make the swimming experience a richer one, including intangibles like commitment, coachability, fun and perseverance, but when we go to the meets and measure our performance, time is "of the essence".

How we track the times

Osprey Aquatics uses a swim program from Hy-Tek called Swim Team Manager to track and manage our athletes' performance. This program is fairly sophisticated and comes with a variety of features for maintaining a roster of swimmers and also entering and maintaining a swimmer's times. It also comes with a variety of preformatted reports including meet results, individual times, team records, etc.

The meets we attend are generally large enough and sophisticated enough that electronic timing is used to track race results at the meet. Many of you have already volunteered for this and are familiar with manning the stopwatch, managing the clipboard and pushing the button on the electronic timer when the swimmer touches the wall. Generally the meet results are captured in electronic format and when the plungers for each swimmer are pushed an electronic signal is sent to a central timing apparatus and the result for the swimmer is captured electronically. This time is then often displayed on a large scoreboard at the meet and lists the finishing time and place for each lane.

Multiple timers are employed to smooth out inconsistencies in the capturing of the time. Multiple timers also ensure that we get someone's time in the event a single plunger doesn't get pushed or a plunger malfunctions. Additionally, each lane has someone who starts and stops a stopwatch for each swimmer in each event so that if the electronic timer totally fails, there is a back up time available. The time captured on the stopwatch is transferred to a clipboard that has a roster of swimmers swimming in that lane for a particular event and can be referred to by the meet officials if required.

At the conclusion of the meet, an electronic version of the meet results is generated and the results are made available to each team and to Pacific Swimming so that individual results can be tracked. Our team statistician takes this electronic version of the meet data and imports it into the Hy-Tek swim software to generate the variety of reports that we need to track our swimmers results and for a variety of internal uses that help us run the team. In some cases the meets are true team competitions and awards points on individual AND team performance. In those cases a team is also competing against another team. These team results are also captured on the reports.

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