Reply to JOs - any idea why they aren’t posting girls results in meet mobile?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They were having all kinds of trouble with the timing pads in the girls’ pool today. I’m guessing that has something to do with it.[/quote]

I used to wonder why the results didn’t immediately appear on meet mobile, and then I became an AO.

1. Heat concludes and times and placements go up on the board. These are generated from pad times, and are NOT official.

2. The AO can set the computer to auto update the pad times to meet mobile or to manually push results when they are official. The willingness of AO’s to auto update is inversely proportional to the number of parents and swimmers who come up to them during the meet to say, “Larlo was 8th on the board, but he definitely finished before Arlo, can you check that?”

3. Official times and placements require the AO to obtain pad times and button times from the computer, watch times from the lane timer sheets, order of finish and DQ’s from the starter and meet referees. The lane timer sheets, ref sheets, and DQ’s are collected by a runner, typically at the end of each event. So if your swimmer DQ’s in heat 1 of 30, the DQ will not appear on meet mobile until the end of heat 30 at the earliest.

4. Ideally, every swimmer has a pad time that agrees with the button times, the finish order from the pad times agrees with the refs’ observations, and there are no DQ’s. This happens frequently in the 13-14 age group and <5% of the time for the 10U age group. It’s common for every single heat in an event to require adjustment. Scenarios that require a manual check include no pad time at all, no button times, the pad time disagrees with the button time by 0.3 s or greater.

5. If any of the above happens in a heat, the AO must decide which time to use (pad, button, or average of watch times), record DQ’s, corroborate finish order, etc. This is why your swimmer might see one time on the board, but a different official time later in the results. In the worst case scenario, the pads and buttons are not working, and the AO will mutter many curse words, turn off auto update for meet mobile, and prepare to manually input (and double check) 16 watch times per heat for an 8 lane pool. If the event has 8 heats, they are keying in 128 times for one event.

6. After all heats are checked, the event is “scored” and the results are official. Usually this happens at least 1-2 events after the conclusion of the event. Keep in mind, the AO cannot even start to check the event until they have the lane timer and ref sheets, which take a while to collect and deliver. At the meets I officiate, the lag is 1-3 events.

7. If you watched the tyr pro men’s 50 free final, you can see how long it took for the results to become official. That is because some AO was swearing like a sailor while they waited for timer sheets, ref sheets, possible DQ slips to arrive, manually entered and rechecked watch times, and then checked finish order.

8. If you are at a meet and need to ask a question to the people running the computers, please consider if you can ask someone else instead. The person running the timer console has to set and reset the pads, so if they miss the small window between heats, the pad and button times won’t get recorded. 
[/quote]

OK, so now I'm even _more_ grateful to the folks who take on this complicated task.  Thank you so much for doing this![/quote]

NP - thanks, PP, from me, too!  This year is our first club swimming and as a dedicated timer, I've been curious about how differences between touchpads (if used), buttons, and stopwatches are resolved.  There are so many volunteers doing so much work to keep these meets running and to give the swimmers a positive experience.  [/quote]

The meet announcement designates the primary timing system. Pads or buttons.  Both the pad times and the button times automatically feed into the timing system and get pulled over by the computer.   If the button times and the pad times are all within 3/10 of a second of each other the pad time is used.  If one button is within 3/10 of a second of the pad the pad time is used.   If the buttons are within 3/10 of a second of each other and the pad time is further the average of the two buttons is the official time (this typically happens bc the swimmer didn’t hit the pad hard enough to stop it but does hit it either when they are on the wall or climbing out.).  If the pad time and buttons are further apart (or don’t exist bc of a malfunction) we look at the watch time.   The starter also records order of finish and we will use that to determine the correct time if the pads and buttons don’t match up.   
Basically the watches are a backup,[b] pressing the button is more important than the watch.[/b]   [/quote]

Hello fellow AO! I’m the AO PP who wrote the overly long explanation. I agree that the button time(s) supersede the watch times, but I think both button and watch times are equally important to obtain. The reason is that when the pads go down, the buttons usually go down too. In that case, you really need those watch times. So definitely make sure you press both!  [/quote]

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