QUESTIONS ABOUT MEETS?
General Swim Meet Information Sheet
Information about qualifying times:
Many parents have questions regarding meets and even more when meets have qualifying time standards. Our Intro and Bronze swimmers will attend meets without time standards, but the coaching staff asks the members and parents to check-in with them before selecting their events. Some of our Silver swimmers, our Gold, and Senior swimmers should expect to compete in events requiring qualifying time standards. The Silver, Gold, and Senior athletes should be working with the coaching staff on event entries for all competitions.
Competitions requiring time standards will post them on the meet sheet and usually have the same name: Zone 3 Championship, Pac Swim JOs, Senior 2, Far Westerns, Western Zone Senior Meet, Sectionals, etc.
All members are encouraged to attend competitions they qualify for.
The introductory qualifying time standard meet is the Pacific Swimming Zone 3 Championship meet hosted in January. The Zone 3 area is a subsection of our Local Swim Committee (LSC), which is Pacific Swimming. PacSwim encompasses Coastal Northern California (San Francisco/Bay Area to Crescent City). Our Zone (Zone 3) is working towards offering the Zone 3 Championship meet as a trials/finals or prelims/finals competition. Swimmers compete in a preliminary round in the morning and based on their performance as well as how many heats of finals are being offered, can earn a second swim at night. Most qualifying time standard meets are prelims/finals type meets.
After Zone 3 Championships, the qualifying time standard meets split between Age-Group, which is 14 and younger broken down into split age groups or single age: 10&U, 11/12, & 13/14 or 10&U, 11, 12, 13, & 14. Two examples of an age-group championship meet are Junior Olympics and Far Westerns. The other grouping is Senior, which is an open age group. With high school being the typical starting point of Senior training/competing. There are 8th grade and younger athletes competing at the Senior level as well as collegiate athletes.
The USA Swimming competition season runs September through August.
