[Breeze]

Long Course Season Update

I have one more interesting tidbit of information to pass along. If you've been reading for a while, you know that short course state is followed by short course sectionals. Long course, doesn't work that way. Instead of sectionals, the long course season has a meet called Zones. In this meet, each area in the Zone is represented by an All-Star team of swimmers. Our Zone consists of Georgia, Florida Gold Coast, Florida, North Texas, South Texas, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Texas, West Virginia, and Louisianna (there are additional teams, but they are general in description and I don't know the areas they come from).

Zone teams are comprised of only 8 swimmers/sex/age group, and each swimmer must apply for consideration. The swimmers are determined in this way...

1. The results from the State Meet are re-ordered so that kids that didn't apply for the Zone team are removed, leaving just the kids eligiable to compete.
2. Any swimmer that wins one of the 100 Meter stroke events automatically qualifies. (Now if the winner isn't going to Zones, that spot is left open and the coaches have an option on how they want to fill that spot. Typically, it would be given to the highest place finisher that is going, but that isn't guaranteed).
3. Each swimmers point totals from their 6 best events are added, and the top 4 not automatically on the team from #2, are added.

Now, at this point you are probably wondering why I'm bringing this up? We have been told by 3 different parents of elite swimmers (ones that have been on the Zone team in the past), that we should sign Bailey up for the team. They feel she has a very strong chance of making it.

This really caught my wife and me by surprise. Bailey just turned 12, making her very young for the age group. We knew about Zones, but felt that making it was a long way off, so we never even considered applying. In fact, we actually scheduled our family vacation for the week of the meet. I'm not sure what we are going to do...given that the grandparents and family from Florida are part of the vacation, we may wait until she is 14 to apply. However, it was very flattering and eye-opening to hear from families of elite swimmers that we should be thinking about things like this...