Fall season begins Monday! We’re looking forward to seeing all our swimmers back in the water as well as the many new faces that will be joining us. I know this is a longer email, but I don’t send many out so please read though it all!
Parking & Pick Up
Parking is one of our problems at Diablo Aquatics. Please DRIVE SLOWLY up Tennis Club Drive and please watch for swimmers crossing the street to meet rides that could be parked on the other side of the road. Do your best to avoid blocking traffic during drop off and pick up. We must allow traffic to flow through the turnaround and through the gate to where our neighbors live. We do not have access the the Tennis Villas parking lot, and there is no parking in the turnaround. You may use our small lot or park on the side of the road while waiting for your children. Carpooling is strongly recommended!
Practice
Our new practice schedule is updated on our website HERE. Swimmers must only participate in the group they are placed into. Parents are welcome to accompany their children on deck for practice but must remain by the retaining wall in the shallow end of the pool. We have very limited deck space and at times we use all of it for dry land portions of practice. Although we need to keep our practices observable to parents, we cannot have any parent involvement in those practices. While parents should be able to observe their children, children should not be able to observe their parents! The best way to accomplish this is to keep parents out of swimmers’ line of sight. Thanks for your support on this.
Meets
Our meet schedule is updated HERE. All swimmers may only enter meets that are listed on their practice group’s schedule. We do our best to remind the team when online entries open for meets throughout the season, but it is parents and swimmers responsibility to monitor the meet registration status. All parents are encouraged to update their Swim Connection & Fastswims accounts to receive notifications for when meet registrations open.
Our first Senior Open meet on Sept 24-25 (TCA, Novato) is now open for online registration. Pre Seniors 13 & older may also enter this meet. Go to Fastswims to sign up.
Our parent volunteer policy is that parents are required to volunteer for meets that their children are entered into. Please do not sign up your child for a meet unless you are prepared to work a timing shift (regardless of whether or not your child participates due to other conflicts). Fines will be imposed on families that do not fulfill a timing obligation if open timing jobs are left when job sign ups close. Parents who are too late to sign up for jobs multiple times may be “prefilled” into future timing jobs.
Tent transport will no longer count toward working a meet job. Parents will still be able to sign up to help out the team in this capacity for organizational purposes. We would still like to create a tent crew that manages team tent set up and take down at meets. If we are able to create a tent crew large enough to handle our tent transport needs then that crew will be relieved of regular season timing obligations (all parents may still be asked to help time at championship / travel type meets where the number of available parents is limited). Please email me with interest in the tent crew. This does not obligate you to join the crew. We will wait until we have enough parents to make it work well.
Arizona
We will be participating in the Holiday Festival again in Tempe, AZ Dec. 2-4. We do not have specific meet information with qualifying times yet, but you can assume they will be similar to years past for travel planning purposes. Last year's meet sheet is attached. This is a "family travel meet" which means families are responsible for making their own travel arrangements. Our team typically flies in Thursday afternoon to begin competition on Friday morning. If any swimmers are interested in competing in Thursday's distance events please communicate those intentions as early as possible with us. Please do your best with travel arrangements to be available for Sunday evening finals. Usually an 8:00pm flight is late enough to squeeze those Sunday swims in before rushing to the airport. You are free to make hotel reservations anywhere you like. The team usually stays down the street at the Residence Inn by Marriott in downtown Tempe.
USA Swimming Registration
USA Swimming is still working through some issues rolling out the new online athlete registration but it should go live on Sept. 1st. I should have more information on Monday regarding new swimmer registration. Existing members will need to renew their USA Swimming memberships prior to Dec. 31.
New members
New members can still register for meets prior to Sept 1st by manually entering a USA Swimming ID with the following format:
MMDDYYFFFMLLLL
Example: John Edward Smith, born 5/23/2010
052310JOHESMIT
Team Registration
New swimmers can access team registration HERE during the first week of practice. You must have a credit card on file for “on demand” charges (social events, apparel purchases, team fines, etc). After your registration is approved you will have the option to change your monthly billing to ACH transfer from your bank if you wish to avoid credit card transaction fees.
