We had a beautiful night on Thursday to finish up our first meet. We had many great first swims by our new swimmers! Thank you to all the parents who volunteered to time, run the cards, officiate the meet and provided hospitality either by donations or distributing to the workers. WE NEED YOU ALL and couldn't have done it without you. The results for the meet are posted on that JSL Website here. The two questions you may have when looking at the results are what does GOLD mean by a time and what does an "X" mean by the time.
GOLD times are time standards the league selects to use to recognize as a time achievement. In Division III (we are division I) they actually score points in the Gold Division and the Silver Division. What that means is that in a meet, the Gold Swimmers compete against the gold swimmers for points and the swimmers who haven't qualified as Gold can earn points for the team (Silver) can earn points against other kids in the silver division.
When we started with the league several years ago, we were in Division III we started giving away towels to the swimmers who achieved Gold times. Division I doesn't recognize Gold times for scoring, but Coach Cos still recognizes our swimmers who achieve these times throughout the season. You may see some of the swimmers from previous seasons with a "Gold FAST" cap or you may see their towels around the pool. We have given the swimmers towels and each year we add the gold times with a star to the towel. Many of the swimmers have accumulated a couple of years of stars on the towels. This is the list of GOLD Time Standards for each age.
The "X" by a time means the swim was unofficial. We are limited with how many swimmers we can enter into each race from our team and also how many races each swimmer can swim. When a swimmer is entered "officially" into a race, they are able to score and receive a ribbon for the place they finished the race. Sometimes however, there is room in an event because someone didn't show up or because the other team didn't have enough swimmers to max out their entries. In that case we can add another race for a swimmer but they are "unofficial" which means the time counts for the swimmer but they can't earn points nor will they get a ribbon.
Beginning next week the meets will be seeded by times. So what you should see are the heats going from slowest to fastest. In the first meet of the year we have no times to draw from so everyone is an NT (No Time). Next week the heat sheet will list the time that is the fastest time the swimmer has swam that race. So by getting in exhibition swims, a swimmer has a chance to improve or get a time before the next meet to improved their seeding (or in the case of Division III teams) earn a gold time to take into the next meet to have a better chance of earning points for the team.
Next week will be another unscored meet for us as we will take on Fry Springs which is a Division II team. After that we will begin our scored meets against the other Division I teams.