A Meet Entry Tutorial

All team meets will be posted on our website under events. In addition, an email will be sent out to all NLAC families with important details pertaining to the meet. A copy of the meet invitation will always be attached to the email. Be sure to read these emails completely. Also, print out the meet invitation and look it over to become familiar with all other details pertaining to the meet. 

Encourage your child to bring the meet invitation, with the schedule of events for the meet,  to his or her NLAC training group coach to discuss, either before or after practice, which events they should swim at the meet. Coaches could even circle the events on the meet invitation for the child to bring back to their parent. Parents, please do not get into a habit of just choosing events for your child. Encourage your child to work cooperatively with his or her training group coach, who sees the child in practice on a daily basis, in order to choose the best possible schedule of events for any given meet.

Now it is time to officially enter the meet online. There are two places you will find the specific meet you are looking to enter. You can either click on the link for Meet/Event at the top of our homepage www.nlacswim.org, or you can find the meet under "Upcoming Events" at the bottom right of our home page. Once you find the specific meet you are looking for, click on the link for "Attend this event". Once you do this, you should come to a page where you will see your child(ren) listed at the bottom under Member Name. Click on the child you wish to enter at that time. You will be taken to a new page with a scroll box next to "Declaration". Scroll to "Yes, please sign (your child's name) up for this event". Make sure you click on the button to save changes. For some meets, this is all you need to do to register your child. For these meets, the coaches will select the events for your child. For other meets, after you declare your child as a "yes:, you will then see a list of events pop up. Please make sure you are aware of possible qualifying times there may be for a particular meet. You will be notified of this information from my email pertaining to the meet, by looking at the meet invitation, or when you are selecting events online (you will see qualifying times listed if they exist).

Click on the events your child has chosen for that meet. Remember to adhere to the entry limitations stated in my email and on the meet invitation. For example, some meets swimmers are allowed 3 individual events per day. If this was the case, you would need to make sure you did not click on more than 3 events in the same day. Once you have all the events selected that your child would like to swim, click on save changes at the bottom of the page. Your child is now registered for the meet.

Other Important Notes:

It is very important that you adhere to the deadline designated for meet entries. This deadline is often earlier than the deadline posted on the meet invitation by the host club. The reason for this is because many meets often get filled up fast because there are so many kids who want to attend. Each meet host club has to abide by a 4-hour session duration rule. This means that they often decline to accept entries after they have a full session. This can come well before the meet entry deadline they designate on the meet invitation. As a result, we often have to send in our entries early. Don't get shut out of a meet. Try to get into a habit of entering your child prior to the deadline given.

When reading the meet invitation, you will see an entry form at the end. You do not need to fill this out. This is for teams entering on paper which we will never do. We will always be using the online system so once you register online, you are done doing what you need to do.

Entry Fees:

Entry fees will be listed in the email pertaining to the meet and it will also be listed on the meet invitation. After you have entered the meet, you will be invoiced for the meet fees at a later date (invoices are created on the 21st of every month). Please note, once you have entered your child online, and I send the entries to the host club, you will be invoiced for the entry fees even if your child does not end up attending the meet. This is because NLAC has to pay for any entries we send to a host club. Please be mindful of this.