Frequently Asked Questions

(Okay, no one has ever actually asked a question, but this is what they might ask.)

• What do the various form fields mean?
  Hopefully most of them are obvious, if not from the name, then from the possible selection values. Those that are not so obvious:
  • Age Group. Drop downs for the standard swimmer age groups and a "Custom" selection. When "Custom" is chosen, you can enter any age range in the adjacent box. The range can be from 1-99, if you want a single age just do, e.g., "11-11".
  • Age Up. This is the date at which you want to determine a swimmers age. Typically this is the date of a future JO meet (and the next two are listed as drop down items for your convenience). You can choose a custom date by selecting "Custom" and filling in the adjacent box with a date in the form YYYY-MM-DD. If you specify a date in the past, then races occurring after that date will not be shown. So if you wanted to see your 12 year olds best times when he was 10, you can use an appropriate date from two years ago. (be sure to use an even earlier Not Before date if you do this!)
  • Not Before. Does not consider any races before the indicated date. You can use this to filter out races that were swam long ago by people who are no longer swimming. You can also use Not Before and Age Up together to do things like show only the times for one season.
  • Standard. The set of time standards to display. The default is Utah which are standards of interest to Utah swimmers. This will show if a particular time is a JO time ("Q"), Far Western ("FW"), or Western Zone ("WZ"). It might also occasionally show other Utah meets with qualifying times, such as the CHAT or RWB Invitationals. USA shows the USA Swimming national standards: "B", "BB", "A", "AA", "AAA", and "AAAA". A variant of USA is USA-single which is a new (June 2009) table of standards from USA Swimming that breaks the USA age group standards into single ages. For example, instead of a standard for "13-14 boys" there is one for "13 boys" and one for "14 boys". It doesn't appear that USA Swimming uses these for anything, but they'll make you feel better if your child just aged up! Senior is a rag-tag collection of "older kid" standards such as Utah Senior State, Sectionals, and Junior Nationals. Finally, you can specify a couple of combos Utah+USA and Senior+USA. It is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out what those do.
  • Stroke. Stroke encompasses course, distance and stroke. For course you can chose short course yards (SCY) or long course meters (LCM). (I didn't realize when I did this that there were occasional short course meters (SCM) meets as well. Some day I'll go back and allow that one too.) You can use the Include Converted Times checkbox which will include times converted from the "other" course. For example, if you choose SCY and the converted checkbox, it will show either a swimmer's SCY time or their converted LCM time, which ever is better. Note that converted times are often not accepted as seed times, so these times are displayed in a lighter font to help emphasize them. You can select either individual strokes and distances or you can select All JO for one or both. These "all" options allow you to display multiple tables at once, rather than having to fill out the form over and over again to get all events.
  • Display. For the Standards Comparison form, you can choose to display either the absolute time required (Times) or how far the swimmer's PR is from that time (Deltas).
  • Extra. These are experimental features selectable via checkboxes. Right now the only extra is IMX Pts.. This displays the Hy-Tek Power Point value associated with each race. These point values are used to calculate the IMX Challenge Scores which are described in the next entry.
• What does the IMR/IMX page show?
  USA Swimming assigns Hy-Tek Power Point values to all swims--the faster the swim, the higher the point value. For every age group, they pick a set of 5-6 events for which they combine your best scores during the season to arrive at the IM Ready (IMR) or IM Xtreme (IMX) score. These are described in more detail here. These scores are computed over the course of a season that runs from September 1st to August 31th. Since there are separate IMX and IMR scores for SCY and LCM, you could have up to four scores for a given age. And, unless your birthday falls exactly on one of the two end dates, you will be one of two different ages at different points in the season. This means that you could have up to eight IMR/IMX scores during one season. The IMR/IMX Scores page calculates any or all of these scores for an individual swimmer or all swimmers on a team. Select either a swimmer or team name, chose the season and course, and one or both of IMR/IMX and see how you are doing! Note that USA swimming will only show your score if you have completed all the events required. My web page will also show incomplete scores if you check the "Show incomplete" box, but will highlight these scores in red to let you know they are not official.
• Why are the defaults for forms biased toward 15-16 Boys?
  Guess which age group my son is in?
• Why are some swimmer ages listed as a range, e.g. "11-12" or "12-13*"?
  In order to present results with arbitrary "age up" dates, I need to know birthdays. However, except for Meet Manager backup files, most of the results that I extract information from don't have birthdays, so I have to estimate them by tracking a person's age from meet to meet. The result is that, for many people, I only have a date range and not an actual date for their birthday. For those people, there will be certain age up dates for which they could be one of two ages. These are the cases where a range like "11-12" is displayed. The worst case scenario is when a swimmer could be one of two ages than span an age group boundary, like "12-13." In those cases I add an asterisk to the output.
• Why are there so many ranges like this in the older age groups?
  Two words: high school. Results from high school meets almost always include a grade rather than an age. In these cases, unless I have an age for a swimmer from an age group meet, I again have to estimate: 9th graders I guess as 14-15, 10th as 15-16, etc.
• Speaking of high school, why don't you have my high school times?
  Most high school meets are not "official" in the eyes of USA Swimming. Only "observed" meets--typically only region and state meets--count. There is a most excellent web page devoted to Utah high school swimming past and present maintained by the Utah Swimming Coaches Association.
• You don't have all of my best times, why not?
  Bummer dude! This most likely happened because those times occurred in a meet that I don't have results for. I can handle text/HTML (.htm), PDF (.pdf) and even Meet Manager backup files, but even so, I cannot add them if I don't have them! So if I could not find meet results in the appropriate format, I didn't include them.
• My middle initial is not 'X', where did you get that?
  Sorry. There are a few instances of swimmers with the same first and last names (e.g., Kyle Smith) and I use the middle initial to differentiate them. In a couple of those cases, I don't know the middle initial for one of the pair, so I arbitrarily anoint them 'X'.
• Can I see my splits?
  Nope. Splits are one area of Hytek output files which are almost random. Sometimes they are there, sometimes not. Sometimes they are partially there. Sometimes the splits are for every 50, sometimes for every 100. You get the picture. I do go to heroic lengths to extract the first leg of relays, since those count as official individual times.
• How do you calculate relay times?
  Single stroke relays are easy. I just create an ordered list, per team, of the top swimmers for the stroke. Then I just take the top four for the 'A' team, the next four for the 'B' team, etc. For medley relays, I essentially try every possible combination of swimmers to find the fastest combo. This is the 'A' team. Then I eliminate those four swimmers and do it again, and again... Fortunately, computers are good at this sort of thing.
• The 13 and older 200 Medley relay times are totally bogus!
  Yeah, yeah. The 13 and older 200 (4x50) Medley relays are especially arbitrary, since most 13 and olders have not swam an official 50 back, breast or fly since they were 12. Nothing I can do about that!
• Why do I get weird (or no) results for the 400 IM relay?
  Probably because what you really wanted was the 400 Medley relay. The 400 IM relay is a hypothetical event where each swimmer swims a 100 IM leg.