USMS Convention

USMS Convention

Clay Britt, Jeff Roddin, CJ Lockman Hall, Cinco Calfee, Eric Nordlund and Debbie Morrin on a chilly day in La Jolla, California.
Summary of Technical USMS Rule Changes for 2000
By Dave Diehl

The following are the significant rule changes beginning January 1, 2000.

STARTING PROTOCOL: (procedure currently used for international meets)

Forward Start - At the commencement of each heat, the Referee shall signal to the swimmers by a short series of whistles to remove all clothing except for swim wear, followed by a long whistle indicating that they should take their positions with at least one foot at the front of the starting platform, the edge of the deck or on the wall before the command "Take your mark" by the Starter.

Backstroke Start - At the commencement of each heat, the Referee shall signal to the swimmers by a short series of whistles to remove all clothing except for swim wear. At the Referee's first long whistle the swimmers shall immediately enter the water and at the second long whistle shall return without undue delay to the starting position prior to the command "Take your mark" by the Starter

(No other commands are required by the Starter, but it is recommended that the Starter notify the swimmers of the distance and event.)

FALSE STARTS: (No recall for false start if start signal has sounded)

Any swimmer starting before the starting signal has been given, shall be disqualified. If the starting signal sounds before the disqualification is declared, the race shall continue and the swimmer or swimmers shall be disqualified upon completion of the race. If the disqualification is declared before the starting signal, the signal shall not be given, but the remaining swimmers shall be called back, be reminded by the Starter of the penalties, and start again.

BUTTERFLY: (Multiple underwater breaststroke kicks are not allowed at start and turns)

After the start and after each turn, only one breaststroke kick is allowed prior to the arm pull which brings the swimmer to the surface.

1999 USAS/USMS Convention Notes
by Jeff Roddin

Ideas for LMSC events:

Relay meets are very popular in other LMSCs (regular relays plus fun relays).
A lot of time and planning should go into the socials that accompany the meets/open water swims as the social can be a primary reason for getting people to return the following year and to attract new entrants.
Oregon has an overnight camping open water event where one swim is Saturday and another is on Sunday.
Florida has a "Doggie Doo" open water relay where you have your dog on a leash and the first pair across the finish line wins.
Clinics get tremendous praise from participants but attendance is usually low. Suggestion is for coaches to recommend them to their swimmers (since many swimmers don't feel that they are "good enough" but if the coach says something it may go a long way).
A clinic idea is to run one at a local college where the college swimmers are the instructors. For one, this makes them more aware of USMS plus the adults in turn get more interested in the college team and attend their meets. The extra support at the meets begins to get noticed by the college swimmers. The money raised at the clinic would go to the college swim team and then they like USMS even more and continue to help USMS swimmers.
Virginia teams up with their local USS club and travels to the Caribbean every other winter as part of the USS club's annual training trip.
One team has a "Flick & Float" on Friday nights. Everybody brings an air mattress or raft and they float around the pool and watch a movie on a big screen.
Virginia LMSC purchased a laptop and Hy-Tek software and it travels around to all their meets. The programmer does all the meet entries and gets paid $1 per swimmer.

Other miscellaneous notes:

20-23% of entries to Nationals this past year were done on the internet. Next year the paper copy of the registration card will not have to be mailed in as part of internet entries.

Alias@usms.org will no longer take on new aliases. Present alias will be maintained. The process to do these aliases is cumbersome because Mindspring does not permit our webmaster direct access to their system. Therefore he has to do them individually as opposed to batch filing. New aliases will be accepted, however, if Mindspring changes their access rules or if somebody else volunteers to do the work.

On-Line Committee strongly recommended adopting PDF as the format of choice for everything from newsletters to registration forms to meet entry forms. This format, when printed out, appears exactly as the author intended it to look as opposed to having numerous formatting differences when printing out .html format where people have different size screens and resolutions.

If Meet Directors use Hy-Tek or similar software, they are encouraged to email their data files to the USMS webmaster since he maintains a searchable database of times. Formats should be in SDIF format or you may zip up the entire meet directory. See http://www.usms.org/comp/resultstrack.shtml for the database of individual swimmers & clubs and http://www.usms.org/comp/toptimes.shtml for the compilation of top times.

LMSC Top Ten Chair is strongly encouraged to work with LMSC meet directors on getting to the Chair meet results in electronic format. Merging the results into the Chair's database should cause fewer errors.

Championship Committee first talked about placing more restrictions on warm up facility requirements but then it was felt so many restrictions have been placed on hosting nationals that bidders are becoming fewer and fewer each year. As another incentive, the meet surcharge was raised from $20 to $30 for swimmers. This surcharge goes directly to the meet host for their expenses. The rationale here is more and more has been asked of meet hosts over the years and these extra requirements have increased costs to the hosts so much so that Minnesota lost money on their meet. It was also felt that starting a meet at 7a.m. for a central or east coast meet is much too early for west coast travelers.

Important change to liability coverage: if a USA swimmer is in your USMS practice, the USA swimmer is not covered by insurance UNLESS the coach is a USA Swimming certified coach (all USMS swimmers in the pool are covered as long as they are all registered and the coach is USMS registered). Moreover, if the coach is not a USA Swimming certified coach then he/she may be personally liable for injury to the USA swimmer in the practice.

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