Welcome to the 1998-99 PVS season from everyone on the Board of Directors. We are well underway with one month of competition completed and preparations in full gear as we approach the heavy load of club and PVS sponsored meets in November and December. This newsletter will be published 6 times this swimming year (September to August), basically every other month. Now in its 3rd year we hope that it will become even more of your newsletter, that is, it will be filled with information that is relevant to you. As the editor, I encourage you to contact me via letter, phone, or preferably email with what you want to know. Then I can put the "experts" directly in touch with you via this medium. In lieu of any input from the PVS swimming community, we will continue to include what we think you want to know!

You may be reading this on our PVS web page or, if you have a PVS Family Membership, you may be reading this in paper format. It is one of the few remaining vestiges of recurring paper documents we make available to our membership. I strongly urge you to review our web page on a frequent basis because that is where you will find out what is going on in PVS and in all of United States swimming. As we told you last year, we are discontinuing our annual hard copy PVS Aquatics Guide; however, shortly all of the information that is normally contained in that document will be available for your viewing on the web page - much of it is already there! Also, we will be able to keep that data up to date as changes occur. Specifically, I refer you to the PVS Contact List that will provide you with the necessary information (subject or title, phone, address, email) to reach out and get questions and issues addressed on a first hand basis. Our web page is a powerful tool available at your fingertips; please use it to its fullest.

United States Swimming (USS) held its annual convention this past month; some of the major actions/decisions are described later in this newsletter. There are a couple very key points that came out of the convention. First, we are going to be calling ourselves USA Swimming from this time forward. It is believed that this will have better appeal as we go forward in this sport and we compete with all the other sports for participants. So don't get confused; USS and USA Swimming are one and the same organization. Secondly, after several years, yes I mean years, USA Swimming has adopted a general Code of Conduct for the sport. This deals with all the subjects you would expect from drugs to alcohol to sexual misconduct and it is designed to protect swimmers, coaches, officials, volunteers, parents and any other category of person associated with swimming. Several changes were made at the convention so USS has not (at the time I am writing this) published an official document; when it does, we will put it out in its entirety on our web page. We are currently reviewing our PVS Code of Conduct to ensure that it is not in conflict with that which now blankets our entire sport.

While all of you will be having fun going to meets over the next couple months, your Board will be busy revising and updating the PVS Policy and Procedures Manual. There have been a significant number of changes in our policies and procedures since we published that document two years ago. We want to review and in some cases reorder the volume to make sure that it really reflects the way we do things. Also, we will incorporate the new USS Code of Conduct as well as the PVS code into the manual. We expect to be finished with this effort sometime after the first of the year. When completed, we will reaccomplish the document and distribute new volumes to the clubs and members that currently are on distribution.

PVS is very lucky to have several new swimming facilities opening either recently, like the U of Maryland Aquatics Center, or in the near future, like the George Mason University facilities and the Prince Georges Sports and Learning Center. Once operational some of these will give PVS the capability to host a major meet, such as the Zone Championship or even a Junior or National Championship. In fact, it appears quite likely that we will be bidding to hold the 2000 Eastern Zone Short Course Meet in PVS. A meet of this nature requires an inordinate amount of planning and preparation and it is our thought that once we successfully conduct one of these meets there will be a lot of national interest in repeat performances. Certainly, the fact that we surround the National Capital adds to our attractiveness; we simply have not had a facility that could really accommodate a national or regional level meet and now we will. Therefore, the Board has approved the formation of an ad hoc committee to assist in supporting this effort. At least initially I will chair this committee, which will include our Senior and Age Group Vice Chairmen, the Operations Chairman and Ron Taylor, who serves as the Eastern Zone Meet Coordination Chairman. I would welcome any other participation from the community-at-large; if you are interested, please let me know.

Finally, I want to congratulate John Hirschmann (see his article below) for the very successful Club Officials Chairman get-together this past month. I believe this was the 3rd Annual event and it represents the best of our attempts to open the channels of communication between the volunteers "planning" and those "doing" the business of swimming in this area. It was a good opportunity for our club Officials Chairs to hear about what is coming down the road that will affect officials and their clubs; it was also a great chance for them to put names with faces.