On Saturday, April 24th, Coach Tricia, Greg Loppnow
and I attended Minnesota Swimming’s (MSI’s) annual
House of Delegates meeting. For those
of you who are unfamiliar with the club governance process, MSI is
the local chapter of USA Swimming and the House of Delegates
meeting is where officers and committee members are elected, and
the annual meet bidding process occurs.
At this particular meeting, we were bidding on swim meets for the
fall of 2010 through the summer of 2011.
A couple months
before the House of Delegates meeting, MSI releases a schedule
showing when all the meets will be held for the upcoming year, as
well as how many meets will be held each weekend. Over the ensuing weeks, local teams submit bids or
applications to host meets based on the published schedule. We submitted four bids with the hopes of
being awarded two.
Over the last meet
season, many of you probably noticed that the meets in general had
a lot of kids participating which led to longer sessions and other
complications. There were several
situations where meets had to cancel the youth relays in order to
fit within the four hour limit, and even others where teams were
shuffled around to another meet with only a few days notice.
Meet participation
was up so much last year because the overall enrollment is
Minnesota swimming was up which is a great problem to have. Recognizing this, MSI added extra meets next
year for most of the weekends that experienced heavy
attendance. That will help make meets
run more efficiently next year, and it provided teams with more
opportunities to host meets. This is an
important fundraising activity for most teams.
With these changes,
we left the House of Delegates meeting extremely pleased with
having been awarded both our first and second choices for meets to
host next year. Our biggest meet
will be a B/C meet which we will hold at St. Cate’s on
December 4th and 5th. This will be a really big meet for us with more
than 500 kids likely to attend. Our
second meet will be an invitational at St. Cate’s which will
be held on February 5th and 6th, shortly
before the short course finals.
Please mark your
calendars now – these will be important fundraisers for us
and it is critical that we demonstrate that we can run meets
exceptionally well. As the fall session
begins, we will begin to look for volunteers to help organize the
upcoming meets so please consider stepping up to help.
