Swim Team Stingrays
Swim Team Primer

Swim Team is a sport for the entire family. As a matter of fact, we require the parents to participate by "working" the meets. If this is your first experience, here is an overview:

The children are grouped by sex - Girls/Boys, then by age. At a single meet, a child does not swim more than three individual events that are decided on by the child and coach.

A dual meet (a.k.a. the regular weekly meets between your team and one other) is divided into two halves. During the first half the children swim the Medley Relay, Short Free, Individual Medley, and Breaststroke. In the second half they swim Long Free, Backstroke, Butterfly and finally the exciting Free Relay. Meets usually start at 5:30 and wind up between 8:30 and 9:30 (except for when they don't!).

Now this is the good part. You will have the opportunity to sign-up for a "job". Here's an attempt to describe a meet and the working positions at the same time:

When the children first arrive, they will go to the area designated for the team. This is very much a social event so unless you have a very young child you will not want to embarrass your child by hanging around here. The social director of this area is known as the Card Distributor. This person has a card for each swimmer by stroke and in order of appearance. It is this hapless person's job to actually connect the child with the card at the correct time.

Once the child has a card, he/she reports to the Clerk of Course. The clerk and 3 or 4 helpers line the children up on a series of benches. The goal here is to have all the children in a single heat lined up on the same bench in lane order - teens tend not to cooperate in this style of organization. The children move up through the benches until they end up behind the starting block, hand off their cards (hopefully still intact), and are ready to swim.

At the starting blocks you have all kinds of people. Each land has three Timers. At our 8-lane pool that means 24 timers. Sometimes there is even a Recording Timer for each lane. As if that is not enough there is a Head Timer to backup the timers and an Assistant Head Timer to back up that person - it's called redundancy and is very popular these days.

The Starter stands on a pedestal and seems to be the most important person but actually that honor belongs to the Referee. There may also be an Assistant Referee.

Anyway, children are on the block, the fans are cheering. The starter intones, "Swimmers take your mark," then BANG! goes the gun. If one of those sweet little things tries to get an edge by diving too soon (jumping with arms flailing is allowed) then the Recall Starter's gun goes BANG! BANG! BANG! and we try again. Once finally on the way, the Stroke and Turn Judges watch to make sure children employ the proper strokes.

The children wind up at the end of the pool. The times are recorded on the cards and the children return to socialize some more, hopefully having stopped to ask their times. By now the next heat is ready to start. In the meantime, the Runner collects the cards and "runs" them over to Records. They duly record the results and pass the cards over to Ribbons where each child is awarded a personalized ribbon marking time and placement.