Operations Division
April 16, 2002 Report



Officials Committee
  • An Officials Committee meeting was held in late January. The committee concentrated on the new referee mentor program and assessed the clinics held during the year. The committee also selected Bob Richardson and Ron Whalen to act as meet referees for Senior Champs in March. It also selected Sumie Emory and Dave Macedonia to attend the officials workshop in Colorado Springs.


  • The new referee evaluation form is in use. Evaluators see the new rating form as an aid to evaluating the readiness of new referees to be certified. It is similar to the Starter evaluation form that has been in use for some time.


  • In March, both the Senior Champs and the Zone Sectional Meet were run as National Certification meets for officials. Joel Black of North Carolina, Vice-Chairman of the USA Swimming Officials Committee, acted as the Meet Referee. He was very pleased with the organization and level of officiating.


  • The patches ordered in March, 2001 finally arrived in March, 2002. Unfortunately, the pins for Hytek and Colorado certification which were requested from the office in October still have not arrived.


  • There still seem to be some problems with registration, but the majority of the officials have finally been registered with USA Swimming. Many PVS officials are inquiring as to when they might receive their registration cards and 2002 USA Swimming rulebooks.

Meet Equipment
  • PADS AND TIMING EQUIPMENT
  • We currently are able to hang three eight lanes pools with pads two buttons and scoreboards.
  • Scoreboards have been recently updated with new circuit boards.
  • COMPUTERS
  • In the spring Hy-Tek classes we will be providing instruction in operating the network version of Hy-Tek. We have six computers, the 3 newer ones have 10/110 cards built-in and three older one have PCICA network cards.
  • All machine will be loaded with standard PVS forms used during meets. Also, loaded will be manuals for Hy-Tek, CTS and DakTroncis equipment.
  • Since all the machines have modems we are in search of a free ISP dial up to allow downloading meet results immediately after each session of the meets. This is possible since most all of the pools we use have internet access available to us.
  • IST STARTING MACHINES.
  • All machines now have microphones with long cords. We are awaiting arrival of larger microphone which will have right handed starting buttons.
  • PRINTERS
  • Currently we have four inkjet printers and two dot matrix printers, all of recent vintage. We have to continue using dot matrix printers for CTS due to the use of DOS based programming by CTS. Use of lasers for CTS is prohibited due to transport of equipment during periods of high temperature swing. This high temperature swings causes the ink cartridges to turn to gel and render them useless. Far better to loss $20 inkjet cartridge than a $100 laser cartridge.
  • LAP COUNTERS
  • Currently we have 30 lap counters of recent vintage. The lap counters currently available do not take abuse easily and need to be replaced quite often. Repairs do not work.

Meet Management
  • Meet announcements (MA) for the first four summer meets have been released. MA's for Senior I/II and Age Group I/II should be released within the next couple of days. Similarly, MA's for PVS Senior, Junior and Age Group LC Champs should be released within a week.


  • As requested by the Board, psych sheets and time lines for PVS SC and Age Group Champs were posted. This helped identify some meet entry problems well prior to the start of the meet.


  • As an experiment, this summer=s MA will include the name and contact point for the person responsible for staffing the meet with officials. We are hopefully this become an more efficient than prior method of all requests going through both ways through the club officials chairman.

Safety Commitee
  • Two reports of occurrence were received. One involved an injured shoulder - purportedly caused by a loose starting block. The other involved an unspecified foot injury caused upon entering the pool. The information provided in the submitted reports was very limited.


  • The prior Safety Committee Report invited head coaches make known their need for Safety Training for Swim Coaches (STSC) by March 15. The only request received was for a class within a week of the request. Accordingly no training has been scheduled for this spring. However, the Safety Committee is willing to explore the feasibility of scheduling a class for September, 2002. A flyer will prepared shortly to determine if there is sufficient demand to warrant scheduling the class.
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