Reply to Swim Team Volunteering - it helps if you are nice

Forum Index » Swimming and Diving

Reply to "Swim Team Volunteering - it helps if you are nice"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The Ladder is the publicly posted times sheet broken out by age/gender/stroke. Its so you know what time you need to be selected for A meets.

What does your summer swim team call the official list of times?[/quote]

Ours doesn't post since some of the times used from B meets are not "real" times.  B meets tend of have officials that don't properly call DQs.  So if a kid is not legal and they see it that basically highlight that fake legal time as something not to consider.  I have seen it happen.  I saw a breaststroke event a kid did butterfly kicks 1/3 of the pool and it didn't get called and was a "legal" time that was far from legal.  You can't put that in the ladder it would ruin your seeding. We use A meet times as our main time and try to put in legit B times.[/quote]

Is that NVSL? One of the reason that volunteers get burned out is that meets (including B meets) need qualified stroke and turn judges as well as referees and starters and three timers per lane so that the times count. If only A meet times counted, most of the kids at our pool would never get a time or a chance to improve because each age group has way more swimmers than A meets have slots. [/quote]

THIS. B meet times absolutely count and the entire point is to improve times in order to make the cut for A meets. The cut is not subjective, it’s the top posted times, based upon “the ladder” or official times which all these “experienced swim moms” claim not to know about.

Our summer swim team has a huge mandatory volunteer requirement that you cannot pay your way out of. [b]We have (no kidding) 10 “board members” who do not have to volunteer at meets because they are exempt.[/b] They just stand around in their cliques and chit chat while the rest of us sweat and run ourselves ragged.[/quote]

That would infuriate me. We have team reps who end up showing up for setup and staying through take down working as hard as anyone. We don't have a volunteer requirement both to encourage families to get their kids swimming at meets and because we usually can get enough volunteers even, but having them and then people exempting themselves would never fly at our pool. [/quote]

What is wrong with you? Those 10 board members are probably doing an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. I'm not one of the "leaders" but I know enough to understand the volume and tediousness of the work that has to be done that you don't see. Our main swim rep spent at least 80-100 hours before the season started creating the calendar, just making sure we booked the space with the pool manager, coordinated with the other clubs in our division, doing required training and meetings for the league, recruiting stroke and turn judges, interviewing and hiring new coaches, creating a survey to figure out what families wanted for the new swim season, consulting with the pool board and public health guidance on covid protocols. The list goes on and on. Another parent spent 20-30 creating the swimtopia, and another one worked on updates to meet manager -  both of which are thankless and really boring jobs that require a lot of detailed work. Our B meet rep contacted a half dozen pools to figure out which ones might be interested in swimming against our pool and worked to figure out a schedule and ground rules for how the meets should work. Each pool has its own quirks about how they think they should work. Then he had to communicate that to our pool families. Not to mention ordering supplies like ribbons, replacing any signs or chairs that were broken last year. My head hurts from thinking about all the things they are doing and I for one am glad they are doing it.

If I have to sweat it out for 4 hours for all of our 6 B meets doing something mindless like timing while they walk around supervising that is fine. FWIW at our pool our reps also come early, and they are there moving chairs and sweating it out with the rest of us. They even stay late to pick up the TRASH that you and your kids could not be bothered to pick up because they want to be respectful to the people maintaining the pool.

OP is unbelievable.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics