Reply to How do I bring this up diplomatically without accusing coach of having racial biases?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In the past our swim team has always used best times to decide who gets to go to A meets or other events. It was very clear cut. This year there is a new coach who usually uses times but has made a few decisions to disregard some kids' times and pick others. When a few parents raised the question he said it's due to the other kids being more consistently fast. I respect that and think that makes sense that sometimes kids have outlier times due to timing irregularities or other reasons.

But the thing I've noticed is that the decision of leaving things up to the discretion of the coach always results in the non-white swimmers not getting picked. The last A meet there was one swimmer who had an outlier time from a B meet who had not been improving, does not go to practices and just happened to get a time that was half a second faster than another swimmer who goes to practices, has been improving and has consistently gotten lower times. If we follow the coach's own stated logic for picking kids the more consistent swimmer should have been picked and not the kid with the outlier time. But the kid with the outlier time is white and the more consistent kid is not white. It's the same every time there are gray area cases and the coach just makes up a reason why the white swimmer is picked.

Would you point this out to someone? Who? I don't think the coach is openly racist but he seems to give white swimmers the benefit of the doubt while non-white swimmers are not given that respect. We are in a majority white area with all white coaches.[/quote]

Don't rush the race issue.

Ask the B parents/kids if they want to swim A. Make a list of names, and send it to the team leadership. Show the list to the parents/kids who are swimming, and ask them to share space with the B swimmers who are inexplicably left out of the A races. Bring receipts. [/quote]
No, this is an absurd idea. Take it to the team reps with the receipts. Swimming is a timed individual sport, if this season swimmer A has a faster time than swimmer B in a particular event, swimmer B should not be selected over swimmer A. Swimmer B needs to do the stroke in a B meet and get a faster time if they want to jump swimmer A. This Coach is screwing up one of the most simplistic and wonderful parts of swimming. The clock does not lie. [/quote]

Except NVSL hides the clock.  Seeded meet times are not available and the team does not share the ladder.  The lack of transparency, which NVSL is promoting by their institutions to only give the seeded meet times to a select few promote this type of behavior.[/quote]

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