Reply to HS Swim - Districts this weekend?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The lasting impact is because this is a sport where the smallest margins matter.  Having a lower seed, outside lane, slower heat, makes a huge difference when the competition comes down to .01
In addition to that, this was a week where most things were cancelled.  My son isn't an elite club swimmer, but is a very good high school swimmer.  He didn't have practice all week. He made didn't make regionals cut time - but will be in due to being in the top.  He was very close though and knowing him, given an extra day and the knowledge of needing the extra push, he would have gotten it done.[/quote]
Saying it makes a “huge” difference is a bit of an exaggeration.[/quote]

NP.  0.01 is huge.  Ask my swimmer who missed the State cut by that amount.  Or the boy trying for the school record who also missed it by that much.  If you are a swimmer or understand swimming, you understand the issue.[/quote]
I get it, my swimmer is currently .1 off of a sectional cut. This argument is being conflated because originally people were arguing that the way districts were run will make the regional meet unfair and I am just not seeing it. I completely agree that individual kids that missed state cuts by tenths or hundredths were disadvantaged if they only swam timed finals, but that is an individual disadvantage not something that is making the regional meet inherently unfair. [/quote]

Seed time is impacted greatly if swimmers get second opportunities.  This creates the issue.  By allowing half of the region to get an advantage is not fair to the half did not.  It does not impact all swimmers and maybe your swimmer swims their best during prelims - so that second chance is not a huge deal.  I have a swimmer that 98% of the time drops major time in finals.  And generally significant drops.  They just can fix the prelim race and make it better at finals.  So not to have that opportunity means a major seeding error at regionals.  They are now put in a slower heat when they would have made a faster one.  That is the disadvantage.  How can you not understand that?[/quote]
The heats are circle seeded at regionals so most of this evens out. I’m just not buying a kid who swam only prelims was going to go from the 20th seed to a top 5 seed in the region such that there would be a huge discrepancy in their lane placement in prelims at regionals. [/quote]

If a swimmer is top seeded they get an inner lane in one of the last three heats.  So there is always an advantage.  Circle seeding helps the slower swimmers to push for time drops.  I love how multiple people have tried to explain to you seed time and you are the only person that is like, "nah, bro, I just don't see it."

You are hilarious.  [/quote]
Happy to entertain but I understand perfectly well how seeding works. 🙄 No one has explained how the timed final at districts had such an egregious impact on a swimmer’s seeding such that it would have a real impact on lane placement at regionals, since no one is claiming that timed finals resulted in a kid getting the 20th seed for regionals when if they had done prelims/finals they would have gone fast enough to get the 5th seed. If that was the case I would agree that the lane placement difference is real (that would be lane 5 versus lane 1). Since you don’t seem to understand, let me spell this out for you. If you are seeded 20th and feel like you could have gone faster in finals and say gotten the 15th seed, you are still in the circle seeded heats and instead of being in the 1st circle seeded heat in lane 2 as the 15th seed, you are in the 2nd circle seeded heat in lane 1 as the 20th seed. That is not a meaningful difference. [/quote]

When you go 5 seconds off your best club time and will now NOT be seeded at Regionals in the fastest heat, it matters that you didn’t get a chance to swim again the following day like 1/2 the kids in the region. [/quote]
What part of circle seeding are people not understanding? The top 24 kids are distributed evenly in the last 3 heats, there is no real “fastest heat”. And if a swimmer didn’t make the top 24, I don’t know that a second swim would have made a difference in the grand scheme of things. The kids that swam timed finals knew it was their one and only chance, so if you add 5 seconds in that swim at some point you need to look in the mirror and stop blaming external factors. [/quote]
It’s quite plausible that a top swimmer might not have earned a middle lane in Regions during District timed finals. Those swimming finals got an extra chance for an advantageous lane in Regions prelims, period. It’s quite common for elite swimmers to have substantive time drops in finals. Districts that just ran timed finals very well may have kept kids out of the top 3 spots in Regions. 
If lane position weren’t an advantage, why have circle seeding at all. 
Agree you’re a troll at this point. [/quote]
Not a troll, but I do feel like I’m having to explain things to people that aren’t familiar with high level swimming. I have a high level swimmer, and if he knew timed finals was all he had he would adjust his swim accordingly. You often see those big drops between prelims and finals, especially from the top swimmers, because they know just how much they have to give in prelims to make finals with a decent lane position. That strategy goes out the window when it’s timed finals. With circle seeded heats, the top 9 are all getting middle lanes (lanes 3-5). If your swimmer is such a snowflake that swimming in lane 5 versus lane 4 is going to crush them then that’s a completely different issue. Is there a difference between lanes 3-5 and lanes 1 and 8, of course, but it is highly unlikely that swimming just timed finals turned a kid that would have been top 9 into a kid that placed 19-24. And I’m sure when regional psych sheets come out you will be able to see that the swimmers seeded 19-24 were not going to hit top 10 times even if you gave them 5 extra swims. [/quote]
You're so right. We should just get rid of prelims all together.  Clearly they serve no purpose.
PS - You're not the only parent of a high-level swimmer weighing in here.  You're not right just because your kid is fast. My kid is fast too and I disagree with you that it's totally fine that different Districts had different meet formats for Regions.  [/quote]
Jesus you are being purposely obtuse.[b] I never said it is ideal that some districts ran prelims/finals and some ran timed finals.[/b] If the decision had been up to me I would have said all districts feeding into the same regional meet need to format their district meets the same way. But the fact that did not happen does not mean the regional meet is demonstrably unfair. Yes, some kids that swam timed finals at districts maybe moved down a few places in the seeding for regionals from where they could have been, but because regionals is circle seeded the difference in heat and lane placement is negligible between a swimmer seeded 10th and a swimmer seeded 15th. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills that people can’t understand the basic math with this. No one that is responding to me ever refutes the basic math with the seed numbers and lane placements, and no one has tried to argue that a kid that is the 24 seed at regionals could have gotten a top 9 seed if only there had been prelims/finals at their district meet. [/quote]

OMG. Not the other PP - BUT YES YOU HAVE BEEN THE WHOLE TIME.  And your "high level" swimmer is an outlier in how they feel about prelims/finals.  My kid has their state cuts do I don't have a dog in this fight, but if they did not I would be angry at the inequity of the situation.  It is  an advantage.  PERIOD.[/quote]
Go back and read my posts and nowhere have I said it was ideal. You can bold and all caps and weirdly put high level in quotes all you want, but you will not find a single instance of my saying that. I firmly disagree that it creates an unfair regional meet though for the reasons that I’ve exhaustively explained and that no one has actually refuted. My swimmer understands the value of prelims and finals but has the ability to adapt. If timed finals is all they have, they will go all out for that swim, and quite frankly it would not result in them swimming 5 seconds slower than they would have in finals of a prelim/final event. Most of the big drops you see in HS are also the function of club swimmers on cruise control during dual meets and turning it on once it gets to districts, states and regionals. The biggest drops are from their HS time, not from their club time. [/quote]

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