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PaperclipPerfector
17hr ago
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One of my kids is doing summer swim. As a parent you have to volunteer at the swim meets if your kid is swimming in them. I found out before hand that certain positions count double when you volunteer. So I'd only need to volunteer every other swim meet that my kid is in. The position I got is "stroke and turn" judge. Basically I have to monitor the swimmers and make sure they are doing all legal strokes, turns, and finishes. I shadowed someone at the saturday meet, and then at the monday meet I was on my own.
Ya'll I DQed so many kids. At least 20 if I had to guess. Almost entirely on breastroke and butterfly events.
Afterwards I was thinking that @ToaKraka might appreciate the pedantic nature of the rules(pdf).
One of the interesting aspects of the judging is that you are supposed to give an equal amount of attention to all swimmers. Usually there are 4 lanes to watch for each judge. Which means each swimmer is getting 25% of your attention. Where it gets interesting is that sometimes events are not full. So you might only have 1 swimmer to watch in your 4 lanes. You are not supposed to just watch that single swimmer. They are still supposed to get 25% of your attention. I was standing there plenty of times just watching 3 empty lanes for 75% of the race.
The swimmer I felt the worst for was a girl doing butterfly, but she must have forgotten that for a half second and came up off the dive doing freestyle (or crawl as its sometimes called), it basically violated all the stroke rules for butterfly.
I had the largest number of simultaneous DQs when three of the four lanes I was watching for breastroke were doing a fully extended arm pull (instead of bring the arms back forward before they passed the hip line.) Then two of them also failed to touch the wall with both hands. It was a frantic minute of filling out forms after that race.
That is another thing, the whole meet basically moves at the pace we do. They won't start the next race until we are done filling out our disqualification slips and are ready to watch the pool again.
In a lot of competitions like this I think DQs are too harsh of a penalty. It seems like it would be a lot more fair if minor and pedantic mistakes were met with time penalties so that people who try hard and give it their best can still be rated and compare and have their speed and number of mistakes still get measured against each themselves and each other, rather than a binary "were you perfect or not?"
My sister in law takes her dogs to agility competitions and there have been events where literally nobody qualifies. What's even the point of having the event then? If someone is actively cheating then disqualifying them seems appropriate. If someone messes up slightly, or does something which if allowed to slide would give them an advantage, give them a large enough penalty that there's no way to possibly abuse it and enough incentive to work on fixing it in the future, while still letting them compete and get a score.
Most common stroke infractions do give you somewhat of an advantage, or they at least just totally change what even you are doing. Most kids' freestyle or crawl stroke is about twice as fast as their butterfly. The time penalties would have to be massive to make up for it. DQs above age thirteen are also pretty rare, so its clear that most kids can learn the strokes and the rules sufficiently to rarely DQ.
It is also somewhat hard to catch minor one time stroke infractions. If I glance over and think I saw an infraction and I describe any level of uncertainty then the Pool Ref will throw out the DQ. Usually stroke related problems are hard to see if they only happen once. Its usually that the kid is doing it wrong the entire time they are in my zone. I felt bad for the girl that did crawl during butterfly because I happened to be looking at her lane right as she did it. She had a 75% chance of being fine, but lost out on that cuz of bad luck.
One example is that you are allowed only two underwater pulls in breastroke off the wall before you are supposed to surface. I saw a kid do three, and that was after I missed him for about 5 meters off the wall. My estimate is that he actually did 4 or maybe even 5 underwater pulls. But I only reported seeing three because that is all I saw, even if I know via simple reasoning that he likely did 4 or 5. In his case if he had merely done three underwater pulls, which is illegal, I likely would not have caught him, because I would have only seen two of his pulls.
Okay that's a good point. The only viewing them 25% of the time adds some probabilistic volatility to things, but on average if someone gets away with 75% of their infractions then penalties ought to be four times as harsh to compensate, and at that point if they get harsh enough to guarantee someone last place you might as well just DQ them. It's not an ideal system, but it seems reasonable given the monitoring constraints.
Benefit of the doubt also goes to the swimmer. So maximum strictness if caught, but chances of being caught for non blatant rule violations is low.
The easiest one to catch is no two hand touch and that's also very easy to comply with.
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