This is untrue. Meet age is age as of first day. Please spare a thought for your pool automation team and coaches who have to make lineups and seed your meets. |
Rays hinted that a certain Olympic trial swimmer can/may return next year to swim. I hope she’s kidding. |
Our team revels in it and celebrates our assistant coaches who swim with the rest of the team. It's nostalgic and fun, like an older sibling who still has a good time being with you. These kids are successful in college, and swimming with them is exciting and even inspiring for the younger kids. |
The annual late July complaint post, right on cue. |
Why not? |
Atrophy? Brutal!! |
But why? It makes no sense to change it now after decades of it being this way. A cutoff of August 1 would make some kids swim up for most of the season. Either way some group of kids will always have kids almost 2 years older than them swimming against them. It is inevitable no matter the date they use. They may as well keep it the same date. |
This seems like a really weird take. Why wouldn’t a team want an Olympic trial swimmer back? Why wouldn’t they want to come back? Summer swim is amazing. The younger kids looking up too the older kids. Why would it be bad to have that awesome role model around another summer? |
^ a 14 yr old olympic trials swimmer swam at all A meets this summer. Shoukd she be banned, too? |
My kid might win if she didn't have to swim against the older kids or the taller kids or the exceptionally talented kids or the kids who had more training or the kids who hit puberty early or the stronger kids. |
Exactly. It's unfair to have done visions that span multiple ages at all, actually. Let's have separate dinner visions for each age and then maybe even subdivisions within those so that my 8.5 year old only has to swim against kids who are 8-8.5, if she still loses we might have adjusted again. But it will be more "fair" than forcing her to compete against a child who is 9 years and a day. That one day contains so much unfair advantage. |
^ lol autocorrect sure had fun with the word division |
The only thing I would change is moving the date to July 1 instead of June 1 or maybe June 15…. Just to try and capture the age kids are for the bulk of the season.
I think age has next to no effect for the 12 and under kids. It can be brutal for those 13 and over boys! Big difference to be 13 racing a 15 year old!! But it is what it is. |
Yep, I’m from another part of the country and it was June 1 in the 80s. I have a June 2 bday. I was so happy because it was that bday that propelled me into to the Olympics for swimming. Oh wait - it meant nothing, I still sucked and was super slow. This comes up every year, I love the folks who propose aging up in the middle of the season. I had a kid age up the day bf all star relays, I guess my kid should have dropped out and DQ’d the relay team they qualified on? |
Isn't that called a red shirted kid? |