Complete RSVP for Gainsborough:  Coaches will be working on the lineups over the weekend.  We are hovering around a 50% completion rate for families completing the RSVP by the deadline.  Frankly, that is very disappointing and, considering how hard as the swim team staff works, my expectation is a lot higher.  It is a lot of work to put together a lineup for a swim meet.  Forcing coaches to scramble around trying to figure out who is and who is not swimming when their RSVP status is “No Response” is unnecessary, time-consuming work and in the case of Tuesday night, cost us a win. (Details below)

Swim Caps:  Many of you have asked about swim caps.  Short answer is there are none left.  If you ordered one online on the team shop AND did not get one, I need to know ASAP.  The long answer is there is a container with several caps in it that is missing.  If it turns up we can give people caps.  Unfortunately ordering caps at this stage is not possible as the turnaround time is 3 to 4 weeks.  As of now, you’ll need to buy ones online at places like Swim Outlet.com or Amazon.com or go to a nearby Dick’s or soon to be out of business Sports Authority. 

Signup for Championships is Coming Soon:  Swimming at the Olympic pool at Georgia Tech is an awesome experience.  If you think it’s only for the top swimmers, that it is not the case.  Each team enters their swimmers with their times.  The league then ranks the entries by times and creates heats where all swimmers are of comparable ability.  Consider signing up your swimmers for the Championship meet when the time comes.

Gate Entry:  We worked on the front entrance this week on the auto closing springs.  We had some trouble with it closing AND latching.  Please help us keep an eye on the gate and make sure it closes and latches when you come and go. 

RSVP Revisited:  I’m going to go into a little inside baseball on why the RSVP process is so critical.  This may be long winded so your forgiven is you give up reading here, but I hope you won’t. 

Coaches start making the lineups for the meet by first figuring out who is available for the meet.  Because we’ve had so many “No Response” statuses the coaches have to lookup directory information for each swimmer and reach out to them or their parent to confirm if they should be a Yes or No.  Sometimes they can’t reach everyone.  I’ve instructed them that any one that we cannot confirm should be put in the meet in just Exhibition heats if possible.

The first heat of every event is a Scoring heat.  In other words in Heat 1 teams will score points for their team based on order of finish.  In Relays you get 7 pts for 1st and 3 pts for 2nd.  Individual events are 5 pts, 3pts, and 1pt for 1st, 2nd and 3rd.  Any heats after the scorning heats are considered Exhibition heats and no points are given (but swimmers still get ribbons).  The coaches’ job is to put together a lineup that maximizes they number of points we can get in each Scoring heat, i.e. best swimmer in Heat 1.  Now there a multitude of additional rules they must follow, but generally speaking each swimmer will max out at two Relays and two individual Scoring heats.  I say generally because sometime there are too many or too few swimmers in an age group to make that possible so sometimes a swimmer may have more of less than the norm.

Once the lineups are completed, both teams exchange them.  From that point on, no changes can be made to the lineups, unless it is something like an illness.  Often times in the spirit of sportsmanship the other team will allow a change for other reasons, like we just found out a kid is out of town or a kid can be at the meet after all.  However, the other team is under no obligation to allow that.  No matter what, come 5:00pm the day of the meet, no changes can be made for any reason.  Once everything is printed it’s final. This is the reason you see the Meet Programs, aka Heat Sheets, printed on colored paper.

What is the point of all this.  In our meet on Tuesday, we had swimmers in Scoring heats that did not show up.  We had other “No Response” swimmers entered in Exhibition heats when they easily would have placed in the Scoring heats.  We had one instance where we were forced to put a “No Response” in a Scoring heats because of numbers in the age group. We learned too late that the swimmer was not coming but we missed the deadline to make a substitution.  We had to shuffle relay teams around because of last minute changes.  The bottom line is the kids missed winning the meet by 4 points.  If we had flipped just one 2nd place finish to a first in a relay we would have won the meet.  Just one more first or second place finish or 3 more third place finishes in the individual scoring event would have won the meet. 

I hate it that the kids did not win this last meet.  It was one we were supposed to win.  We knew we were missing some good swimmers and it would be close.  We had no idea that it would be that close.  Dealing with incomplete RSVP information did not help matters. 

So I plead with everyone to get your RSVP completed before the deadline, Sunday nights at 10:00pm.  And if for some reason things changes let the coaches know immediately.