The swimmers who will compete Saturday in the Virginia AAA state championship were not yet in middle school the last time the season-ending meet was held at the Princess Anne Recreation Center in Virginia Beach. But the story of that pool — which sparked controversy when it was found to be less than a half-inch short of 25 meters at the 2003 championships, thus nullifying several national records — is well known by many of the athletes.
The pool has since undergone construction to meet competition standards. Yet while the lanes this year are a full 25 meters, there’s another type of measurement that will affect the athletes from Northern Virginia.
Swimmers in the Washington area — and much of the nation — compete in short-course yards, not meters, and the difference affects, at least minimally, their preparation. (In a meter pool, swimmers will be working an extra 2.34 yards per length.) More drastically, however, the meet’s times will leave few, if any, comparisons for the athletes to use as reference.
“We’re probably the only state in the country that has done short-course-meter states,” said Oakton All-Met senior Bradley Phillips, who will swim for the University of Virginia. “And every [time] a bunch of national records are set and that’s pretty cool, but it’s also a [letdown] that you can’t compare your results to Maryland or North Carolina or something. It’s just not what you’re used to.”
As a result, many of the area’s top swimmers said some of the luster has been taken away from the state meet — and this comes on the heels of a stretch in which snowstorms have already robbed the championship season of its usual stature. The region championships were reduced to timed finals because of the snow, and many swimmers competed at that meet after an extended break from practice.
“I’d like to do well at states but regions was the meet I was focused on,” West Potomac freshman Hellen Moffitt said. “Yards and meters, the times aren’t the same. It doesn’t really correlate as well. I’m not as focused on that meet, it’s more just for fun.”
Several swimmers shrugged off the extra distance by saying they were accustomed to the length from summer swimming. Most area swimmers compete in short-course meter pools during summer swimming in the Northern Virginia Swim League and other leagues.
Still, Yorktown Coach Dave Lassiter said the transition is greater for area swimmers to go from yards to meters than for Virginia Beach schools going from meters to yards — as they do when the final meet is held in Northern Virginia.
“It’s definitely to our disadvantage,” Lassiter said. “For 10 weeks we’ve been swimming yards. They [had] one day [Wednesday] and then warmup [Thursday] and then one race to [adjust and] make it to finals. It’s sending them back to summertime.”
Despite the difference, swimmers will still be able to make automatic all-American standard times through a conversion system set up by the National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association (NISCA).
Upon learning the Virginia championships would be held in a short-course meter pool, NISCA President Dana Abbott said he set into motion a process to create a chart with all-American standard times in meters for swimmers to see prior to the finals on Saturday afternoon.
A chart did not exist before, he said, because it is so rare for high school events to be held in short-course meters.
“We actually have quite a few more we have to convert for altitude factors in Colorado and New Mexico,” Abbott said.
After 10 national records were set at the state meet at Princess Anne seven years ago, a measurement found the pool to be just shy of 25 meters in some lanes, prompting the records to be thrown out and the accomplishments of many of the swimmers to be rendered all but obsolete.
The pool underwent reconstruction in 2008; the wall on the shallow end of the pool was shaved back, remeasured and re-tiled to correct the problem, and a sign posted in the revamped complex now deems the venue to be a “regulation competition sanctioned pool,” said Teri Dalone, aquatics coordinator for the city of Virginia Beach.
The meet is held every few years in the Virginia Beach area, at least in part to provide a balance in terms of which regions host the meet. It was held in a short-course meter pool most recently in 2007.
There are short-course yard pools nearby, however. The Virginia A-AA meet is being held on Saturday at Old Dominion University — which has a short-course yards competitive pool.
Tom Dolan (no relation to the Olympian swimmer of the same name) coordinates the swim championships for the Virginia High School League. Dolan said the VHSL did not receive a request from a member school to host at George Mason, which has held the meet in the past. That might be because the Northern Region has hosted several large events in recent years, he said, and “certain parts of states feel overtaxed to host events.”
The meet was held last year at the Freedom Aquatic & Fitness Center in Manassas, but that venue is holding the Virginia State Independent School championships this weekend.
Virginia Beach volunteered to host, Dolan said, and with the rotation set to move the location that way already, and few other venues able to handle a large number of swimmers, the meet ended up back in that area.
The biggest impact for Northern Virginia swimmers likely will be for the distance freestyle athletes, who have become accustomed to pacing themselves for a 500-yard event. Instead they’ll face a 400-meter swim at the state competition, a welcome change from past years when the VHSL used a 500-meter race, a very rarely used distance. That change minimizes the physical impact of the yards-to-meters change.
Phillips, who is seeded first in the event and swam meters in 2007, says the shorter race (400 meters is the equivalent to 437.45 yards) will not impact how he approaches the swim — though he said he might have had to make some alterations had the state stuck with the 500-meter format.
Edison senior Balazs Kiss, who is seeded third in the event, said he would use the preliminaries to see if he has to make any changes.
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