4 hour rule

So, I write periodically parent ed articles for the members of my team. They are sometimes just quick writes by me, or sometimes I include articles from other sources to help educate the swim parents on our team. I find it very important to educate parents of the sport as many things in our sport are not intuitive, but many times we as coaches feel like they are. My last two have been about time standards and divisions at swim meets, and then about the different formats at championship meets (Timed Finals and Prelim/Finals). I won't write another one for at least another month, but I wanted to put some up here on my blog as I know some parents do read the blog. I want to explain the 4 hour rule with some opinion as well.

The 4 hour rule is some what simple. One Session of a swim meet can not exceed 4 hours that has swimmers 12 years old or younger. This is why a large LSC like Southern California Swimming has most of their meets as two sessions on a single day, to allow for more swimmers to participate. This rule does not apply to meets that are designated championship meets.

The origin of this rule is based on a great concept. 12 and under swimmers and their parents don't want to be at the old style marathon meets of 6 to 8 hours for two days. It was an effort to promote the sport at the younger level. This rule was estlablished around 2000 and has done a great job to make meets more tolerable, and has been great to getting people to be more willing to participate in swim meets.

What went wrong? The sport exploded. Now there are so many swimmers, that there aren't enough meets to provide a good opportunity to all of them. If more teams hosted meets, then the problem comes up that we don't have enough officials to do all the swim meets because of the rules regulating how many officials need to be officiating a swim meet.

What else has suffered? Distance Events for the most part. 11 - 12 swimmers have less opportunities to do the longer more challenging events, as they take up a lot of time, and expand a timeline. We have discovered that most of our best swimmers had early success in longer events, but when do they have the opportunity to try the event out? Let alone, trying to excel at a longer event.

We are lucky, as our team has a good amount of officials that we can run a Intrasquad meet that only has distance events. We have a good relationship with another team that helps put on meets that are geared towards the non-JO swimmer, so the longer events don't have time standards on them. Still, the 4 hour rule does affect our other regular BRW Meets.

The rule is a great concept, but we have to adapt to make it be effective with the boom in numbers for our sport. We need more volunteers to be officials, so that teams can run more meets at the same time within an LSC (or Section in our case). We have to clearly identify swimmers who should be attending the meets geared towards developmental swimmers, and other swimmers who need to attend meets that are designed for racing faster competiiton. (This also goes back to the blog post of picking events for particular meets).

I hope that explains what the rule is and why it was created. The meets that you've attended and you might have noticed the frustrations that I indicated. Know that they exist because of the rule, but it isn't the rule that needs to go; it is the adapting to make the rule effective that needs to happen. So coaches need learn to identify meets, and parents need to consider volunteering to be an official (especially if you're one of those parents who doesn't want to coach your child, but you want to be involved in childs acitivity. This takes you away from possibly coaching your child at a meet, and gives you a purpose to be at meets, and to give to the sport your child participating.