PCC - Autumn Cruise, Huron High School, Ann Arbor

The first thing you notice when you get to Huron High School is that it is simply massive, making the pool almost impossible to find. The second thing is that they are practically on the bank of the Huron River, which flows through Ann Arbor. The third and most amusing thing is that, above the football stadium are these words: "Home of the Huron River Rats."

Yikes! Who wants to tell the grandkids that the mascot for their alma mater was a rodent? Well, I guess a lot of people. Look at all those crazy University of Michigan people cheering for their beloved Wolverines.

This was a two-day meet in Ann Arbor, and Lexy swam four events on day one and two on day two. Even though she was swimming in the afternoon, the events were well organized and the meets went like clockwork. Much better than last week!

The way they categorize times at these levels are Q1, A, B and C times. If you get a Q1 time that means you are CRAZY FAST!! It also means you qualify to compete in the state finals at the end of the season. Each event has it's own qualifying times in each category, boys' and girls' times are different, and are separated by a few seconds. Lexy has mostly B times, with a couple of C times that are really close to Bs. Our goal for this meet was not to lose any time on the Bs, but to do better in those events where she has C times, and move them into Bs. For example, she needed about 3.5 seconds in the 5o Breaststroke to get a B time, and she needed 1 second in the 5o Backstroke to get a B time.

On Saturday, Lexy swam the 100 IM, the 50 Fly, 50 Free and 50 Br. Of these, she had three new best times: 1:39.82 in the 100 IM; 37.05 for the 50 Free, shaving off about 1 and three-tenths seconds (and staying in B time range), and a new best time for the 50 Breaststroke, shaving off about 3 seconds. She needed another three-tenths of a second to get a B time!! We will be trying for this next weekend!

On Sunday she swam the 50 Backstroke and needed only one second to get a B time. Her fastest time was 47.77 and she got a 47.79 -- so essentially the same. Again, we'll try to get better next weekend on that one.

Lex gets a little discouraged when she comes away from these meets without making any visible progress but these USS meets bring in some amazing talent from all over the state. I think it will be key to keep her interested while she is 9, to get her to that 10-year old status where she is at least in the top 8 again, and, I hope, getting some A times!!

Dale Gooding Meet - WORST MEET EVER!

November 1, 2008 -- Since we've been swimming, we've had our share of good and bad experiences at swim meets. Since these events can really take a long time, we've developed a genuine appreciation for swim meets that run like a Swiss watch. We've had more experience with these since we started attending more of the U.S. Swimming sanctioned meets. These are meets that must finish within a certain time period or risk being fined by USS.

This past weekend, Lexy was looking forward to swimming in a Dolphin meet at a local high school in Saginaw. There is less pressure, and more of her friends go since it is local.

She was scheduled for four events: 200 Free, 50 Fly, 100 Free and 50 Breast. She did well in the 200, swimming the event for the first time in a timed meet and getting a time under 3 minutes, 2:57. There's a lot of room for improvement here, but we really wanted her to get experience with this event. The 50 Fly was about a second slower, but still a very good swim. The 100 Free -- not really anything to write home about. We'll talk about the 4th event in a moment.

What struck us, as we went through the order of events, was there appeared to be a break in the action about mid-meet. When the organizers started making announcements over the PA system, we realized our fears -- they were stopping the meet in the middle to have a "still got it -- prove it" event for anyone over the age of 21 who wanted to swim a 50. What this meant was that anyone who happened to have a bathing suit with them and wanted to do this "exhibition" swim, could strut their stuff.

What this did, in essence, was set the entire swim meet back half an hour -- first to let those swimmers warm up, and then swim their event. Because this took so much time away from the regular meet, they had to spend another half hour to let all the participating kids warm up again, and then -- there must have been a real brainiac at work scheduling this meet -- they scheduled 5 heats of the 500 Free. On average a 500 Freestyle takes about 6 minutes to swim -- so there went yet another half hour.

Once we figured out that all this activity was basically resulting in us having to sit and wait another two hours for Lexy to swim a 50, we decided to bail.

Not only we were very disappointed in the organization of the meet, the organizers should have also been able to calculate that the meet would go well through the lunch hour. By noon, they were running out of food and drinks at their concession stand, both for the swimmers and for the spectators.

Needless to say, this one is off our list for next year. We are anxiously looking forward to a very well organized meet in Ann Arbor next weekend at Huron High School.