Potomac Valley Voices

General Chairperson’s Corner

by Dick Rankin

Congratulations to the Curl-Burke Swim Club for hosting another outstanding JO Swim Meet. This meet continues to get faster, allowing our swimmers an opportunity to experience first hand the level of competition that is out there. Concerns arose regarding the number of PVS swimmers making finals. The issue was addressed by the competition committee and was felt that the level of swimming provided by the out-of-town teams was what the committee had hoped for. It is a credit to our association competition program and our clubs, that so many non-PVS clubs want to participate in this meet. Thanks goes out to the committee for attracting the best crop of non-PVS swimmers ever, while having only a limited number of out-of-town spaces. We saw many Junior, Senior, and Top 16 cut times achieved.

I also want to congratulate the clubs that ran and organized the 3 non-PVS meets in December that led up to JO’s. I have heard very positive feedback about each of those meets. I hope that in the future we will push our LSC in this direction even more. We will be putting together next year’s schedule over the coming weeks and I would welcome your input through your coaches.

Lastly, as we do annually at the JO meet, we recognized our PVS Outstanding Swimmers for the past year. Special congratulations go to the those athletes who were selected by the Competition Committee. Our winners were Coleen Sullivan and Chris Williams (10 & under), Jennifer Lichtblau and Cori Bemis (11& 12 ), Lindsey Ertter and Markus Rogan (13 & 14), Lauren Stinnett and Greg Long (15& 16), Kathleen Rimkus and Lauren Silva and Scott Werner (17& 18), and finally Lauren Stinnett and Tom Dolan ( Senior ).

These may be the recipients but every last swimmer, among our 6,000+ members, is counted among “the winners!” We also honored PVS members of the national teams who were highlighted in the last issue of Voices. Certainly well deserving, but with a great deal of sadness, PVS also honored Dave Davis, who died last summer in a tragic accident, for his many contributions to swimming.

Operation Division

With the holiday season behind us, I would like to extend a Happy New Year to everyone in the Potomac Valley Swimming Community.

Reflecting back, the first half of the season certainly provided changes, excitement and a few "bumps" for operations. Entering into the second half of the season, Operations is going to continue its efforts to acknowledge, improve, and efficiently fine tune the changes taking place within the division and PVS competition program.

The Operations Division is charged with providing equipment, technical training, officials training, meet support, and operation procedures to support all aspect of competition. Committees under this division include; (Jack Mechler, Chair), operation support (Don Smith, Chair), Officials (John Hirschmann, Chair), meet entry support (Becca Peck) and equipment (Jerry Ambrose).

Functioning as a team, we want to ensure quality meets, meet management, equipment, meet support, and training to allow our athletes a fair and equitable opportunity to perform their very best. New technical arenas and creative minds will allow Operations to meet these "good" challenges for the prosperity of the LSC.

Policy and Procedure

Periodically, we will be using the Voices to update you on the changes to our policies and procedures. At the same time your clubs will receive change pages to the PVS Policy and Procedure and BY Law Manual that reflect these changes. I am sure that your coaches would really appreciate some parent volunteer to keep the manual up-to-date. I suspect this would be about a 15 minute job every 3-4 months. This job could prove to be invaluable to your team and could help your staff avoid an embarrassing situation because it was operating from an outdated manual.

The following is a brief synopsis of the changes since the manual was first published last May.

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• Coaches Continuing Education Program: Identifies the Head and Assistant Head Coach of the Short Course Zone Team as recipients of a Continuing Ed. Grant.
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• Emergency Hearings: Establishes procedures for emergency hearings to be conducted at a swim meet to address appeals of administrative decisions that affect the meet. Reminder: Rulings of the referee regarding technical judgments are final and not subject to the Emergency Hearing Process.
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• PVS Code of Conduct: Establishes clearer guidelines regarding non-acceptable behavior by swimmers, coaches and staff representing Potomac Valley at competitive events. It also clarifies disciplinary options available to team coaches and managers.
• Short Course Zone Team Athlete and Coaching Selection: Expands and modifies existing policy on coaching selection to include identification of team purpose and selection of Zone Team Athletes.

In addition we have modified two sections in our PVS By Laws to comply with USS direction and guidance. These are on the forwarding of LSC Board of Review decisions to USS and indemnification of LSC representatives.

Official’s Committee

I am writing this soon after PVS completed its highly successful 1997 JO meet. The coaches were very pleased with the meet because the times were fast and many of our swimmers did well. It takes many individuals to have a successful meet, including all the people who supported the Meet Director and the Host Club, the Operations Support Committee, who insures the electronic equipment is available and working throughout the meet, and the almost 100 people who officiated. Thank you one and all.

At this meet Dave Davis’ family was presented with the Kenneth J. Pettigrew Award which had been awarded, in his memory, for all his efforts at the USS convention. While most of you knew of his efforts in PVS, Dave played an equally key role at the National Level as both a member of the USS Officials Committee and the preparer of much of USS’s training and testing material. As I observed the quality of officiating at this meet, I know Dave would have been very proud of how we carried on in his absence.

At both sites of the meet, I found the officials to really be enjoying themselves, as they saw excellent swimming up close. They made an essential and meaningful contribution to the conduct of the competition. We all really appreciated that the meets were so well staffed. With more volunteers like you, this is something we can do for PVS meets at all levels of competition.

We will be having a Stroke and Turn Clinic in late April, I hope you will decide to join the PVS officiating community. We have both a good time and feel a sense of accomplishment as we make a contribution to a sport that your children enjoy being part of and from which they get so much.

PVS Webpage

As we are well underway into the 97-98 short course, your home page team is plodding away to try and bring you the best & most current PVS info for your browsing pleasure. We have been operating under a home page address, www.umsa.umd.edu:80/pvs/, that was used to experiment and build a core set of information and results that was considered most desirable. We have received a lot of positive feedback especially concerning the rapid posting of results, usually within 3 days, and the creative ability of our webmaster to build a data base in which you can search your ranking by team, age group, stroke, distance, or virtually any combination.

Our plan is to always retain the previous year's results on the home page, but the searchable data base will provide rankings for only the current year. Another great benefit of the page is to include late breaking news as it occurs. This may involve anything from impact on meet sessions of weather conditions or special performances by our swimmers.

The big change is to now provide a means to reach the PVS home page via an address that most closely identifies who and what we are. We expect the new home page, http://www.pvswim.org, to be operational by approximately the same time as you read this newsletter. We hope to meet your needs through opportunities for you to continue to provide suggestions and feedback. Thanks and good luck.