Reply to Why doesn’t USA Swimming use cut-off dates like every other youth sport?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Unfortunately the only way to make this "more fair" is to have smaller age groups - instead of the current 24 months (9-10, 11-12, 13-14) have 1 year or even 6 month brackets.  Because as we all know, you can now have a 11y1d swimmer competing against a 12y364d swimmer in the same event - a 24 month difference.  A reconciling would be to have the range be 6 months - 11y1d to 11y181d instead.  But 1) there aren't always enough swimmers to flesh out a heat and then you have half empty heats which takes longer and then 2) you'd end giving out 4x as many medals etc.  So unfortunately there isn't really a great solution for this that I can envision.  Part of the problem is that the season is so long for the swimming (oct-apr or so) that it doesn't track well to have a singular cutoff.[/quote]

You're right, the real source of the unfairness is the wide brackets and not the cut offs.  There's a gigantic difference between a 11y1d and 12y364d kid in terms of physical development and you're going to have issues like that no matter what the cut off date is.  I don't think it's really unsolvable though.  You could make the brackets smaller and just swim kids together in heats when there aren't enough, but then produce the results by age.  They do this in a lot of the mini meets where the 6-8s are in the same heats (and sometimes they even combine boys and girls heats), but then the results are Girls 8, Girls 7, and so on.  One year brackets are also somewhat unfair (there's no perfect system), but a lot less so than the two year ones. [/quote]

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