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March 18th Help Wanted! Team Record Boards and Officials

Joseph Shelly

Good afternoon Tritons,

I have some goals/plans for the team coming up that could use help or ideas! I will start this post with what I am hoping we can accomplish and what help we will need to get things in motion. Near the end of this post I will give some context into where we are currently and what has been done.

If you are able to help with either, please let me know by sending me an email!

Help Wanted: Record board Updates

  • Help needed with creating stickers to update the record boards currently in storage
    • We need the use of a Cricut to print names and times for the records
    • We have a printer that accommodates 11x17 paper (used to create the stickers)

 

Help Wanted: Officials!

  • Officials are required to certify meet results and to hold YMCA or USA Swim meets
    • Our hosting capability is greatly reduced without a bigger pool of officials
    • We are in a huge need of level 1s! You must be a level 1 official for a certain number of meets before becoming a level 2
    • Send me an email if you are interested and are able to help!

 

[Our current fundraiser will be helping us install our record boards in storage and purchase a record board for the 8&U group.]

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Officials context

Our last meet was a relatively big meet with 130+ swimmers, and we ended up running with 5 officials (including myself). We had an AO from our team (Elizabeth Shelly) and a level 1 from our team (Kalohi Clark). HUGE thank you again to our team's officials! The other 2 officials were one from Snohomish and one from YGS who were gracious enough to lend us some support to keep the meet running smoothly and the opportunity alive. Even with the help, 5 is still a small number of officials for a meet that size. I also did not know if we would have other level 2 officials (other than myself), and so I got the meet approved by putting my name down as meet referee. I was informed afterwards that if I am listing myself as meet director, I shouldn't be listed as meet referee (though I had argued that I was needed in that role to ensure the meet did not get canceled). If I am an offiicial, I can absolutely not coach at the same time.

We are deciding the YMCA swim meet schedule for Spring/Summer with our first meeting being tonight at 7:00pm. I am hoping to at least host something in August for the end of the year, but the uncertainty of our officials pool makes it hard to nail down anything earlier for our home meet opportunities. 

Record board context

I have been in talks with our team at the Y about getting our record boards up. One big hurdle that we have is the boards that were purchased by the previous leaders of the team are not so easy to update. The company that sells the stickers to "update" the board is selling them for $15 each for the first 4 and then $5 per sticker afterwards. The problem is they bundle that deal based on the specific board being updated (we have 4 seperate record boards). To update those record boards, they are charging our team $410 for stickers.

I've then reached out to our marketing department and tried to work with them to get stickers in house. We've found that it does work and it is possible to use a Cricut and a printer that accommodates 11x17 paper to create the correct size updates. Unfortunately, there is only one person upstairs that knows how to use the Cricut and vinyl stickers and they are busy running other marketing campaigns at our Y. 

Additionally, the previous leaders of the team forgot to purchase a record board for our 8&U swimmers. The boards were somewhere between 1,000-2,000 each from what I can gather, though with such poor customizability I am very skeptical about buying from the same company. The positive side of using these record boards is that we already have them and they do include records for LCM (which is new to our team since after Jim and before myself). The inclusion of LCM records does help motivate our swimmers to attend those meets, and as we look for more LCM opportunitities it would make sense to have records.

This area has been historically poor at providing LCM opportunities, the only meets locally being at the Coleman Pool and KCAC (where they are mostly invite meets and have qualifying standards to attend). I am asking KCAC and Coleman Pool to see what their availibility is for potential LCM meets, and if our PSSA/YMCA groups can host. The Wenatchee meet in June is currently the ONLY non-qualifying LCM opportunity in our state.