swim team coverage

Following trends in boys' participation can be cool, particularly if there are any schools with normal-sized girls teams and really tiny boys teams. It's kinda fun to ask coaches what they're doing to get boys to stick with swimming; usually it involves not wearing Speedos.

I'll echo the comments about nutty swim parents. You have to realize that swimming is generally a 24-7/365 sport, and the only time most newspapers take any interest is during the high school season. Which, as several others have mentioned, is totally not a big deal to most of the kids (and their pushy parents).

The club-school conflict is always an interesting one. Poke around and see if there are particular schools with lots of club swimmers who are not on the high school team -- then start asking why. In this area, there are a few schools which mandate attendance at high school practice, and the club kids either can't or won't comply. (There's also one particular club coach who all but forbids his swimmers to compete for their high schools.) Other schools acknowledge the differences, and make allowances... which can cause a whole separate set of issues, like when the superstars aren't permitted to swim at major meets because they haven't shown up for enough of the duals.

Can you tell I've been on this beat for a while? :-\

 

Run agate and a photo and go take a nap.

It's fucking swimming.

 

Though I never minded covering swimming (probably because diving was a league- and state-meet only event when I was doing it), this cracked me up.

 

The truth is out there. This is it.

 

Make sure nobody you know is dating one of the coaches and offers to throw a pizza party for the team if they throw you in the pool after a meet. Something like this happened in my coverage area (but not to me) about 10-15 years ago.

 

Swimming, like the sport Athletics, should be covered every four years.
Agate under the local Dressage event will be just fine the other 47.5 months.

 

Swim parent: "Why won't you come cover us on our Saturday meets? There is going to be nearly 200 swimmers there!"

Because Ma'am, there's 160 guys playing at the semi-huge college football rivalary game and there will be about 50,000 people watching. I am guessing you guys are hoping for 50.
Of course, when I tell her the political answer ("There's a lot of things going on and we'll try to get to as many meets as we can") all I get is the "Well, the Podunk Weekly is covering it."
Yes Ma'am, b/c the guy who runs the sports section at the Podunk weekly is SE of another paper in the chain and gets paid 10 hours of overtime a week to put together that section. If he can take four photos, get a call-in on the results from a coach and write it up in 20 minutes he's coming out ahead on the deal.

 

Dress in layers. I cannot stress this enough. Because for as cold as it is outside, when you walk into the nadatorium (a huh huh, huh huh ... nads ... yeah, heh heh, heh heh), it will be 90 degrees with 200 percent humidity and there will be lots of screaming and lots of chlorine in a very small area. I almost fainted the first time I covered a meet, with me in my long-sleeved shirt and coat and sweating like Amy was standing in front of me.

 

The one good thing about swimming results is you can pretty much compare times from big schools and small schools.

So you can run a top 5 or 10 weekly list of the top times in each event. Just be sure that all times are in yards or meters. Like someone said earlier, convert the meter times to yards.

 

The truth shall set you free.

 

Yes, swimming - like cross country and track and some other things many of you detest - is all about the agate.

 

If you could get the coaches to give you the times when they call in. Around here some coaches won't do that because they're worried about opposing teams buying copies of the paper (or getting it online) and stacking their lineups accordingly.
It's kind of like a football coach asking you not to put the leading rusher's stats in the paper because other teams will know whom they have to stop.
They want to be covered like a major sport, but don't like it when you insist on getting the same kind of information you need when covering a major sport.
Does anyone know if a team ever lost a meet because its opponents shuffled their lineup based on times published in the paper? The next time I hear about it happening will be the first.