Reading A Heat Sheet
If you are new to swimming, Heat Sheets can be a bit overwhelming or confusing. You are probably wondering what is a Heat Sheet and what does my swimmer need to understand.
Heat sheets are the "Line Up" / "Roster" / "Program" for the a given swim meet. It tells you how many events, what order the events take place and who is swimming in each event, in what order. The Head Coach determines the meet line up, the Sunday before a given meet based on what swimmers have signed in to attend the meet. See Meet Sign up.
A heat sheet can be broken down into 4 main components
- Event
- Heat
- Lane
- Swimmer Details
Event: This gives you the description of the event - "Event # / Girls or Boys / Age Group / Distance to swim / Type of stroke being swam" For example - "#14 Girls 7-8 25 Yard Freestyle"; In this case it is event number 14, and in this event the 7-8 year old girls will be swimming the 25 yard Freestyle. This is typed in bold, and everything under it will be part of that event until you see another event in bold print.
Heat 1 of 5 Finals: This tells you which heat it is. At big meets you can’t fit everyone swimming an event into the lanes available, so they have to take turns. So heat 1 is the first group that will swim this event. This also tells you how many heats there are, in this case there are 5 total heats of this event. The “Finals” part of it means that the fastest kid wins.
Lane Number: The number to the left of the name tells you which lane your child will be in during their heat. Lane 1 is always supposed to be closest to the starter.
Swimmer Details:
Name: Name of the swimmer
Age :This is the swimmers age as far as the meet is concerned. This maybe different than your child’s actual age. It depends on what the official “age up date” for that meet or swim league is.
Team: This is the team abbreviation, each team has a unique abbreviation. You can find usually find a key to the abbreviations at the front of the heatsheet. Seadragons team abbreviation is SMSD.
Seed Time: Seed time is the fastest time the swimmer obtained in the past for that particular event. "NT" stands for “no time” because the team has no record of the swimmer ever swimming the event before. Seed times are important for a lot of reason, but most importantly it is ever swimmer’s goal to try to beat this time during each of their swims. If you beat your seed it is a successful swim regardless of where you place!
RELAYS
Every meet starts with the Medley relays and ends with the Freestyle relays. The 6 and under age group does not complete in either the Medley or Freestyle relays.
Medley Relays are swum in the following order: 1) Backstroke, 2) Breaststroke, 3) Butterfly, 4) Freestyle. Accordingly, in the relay event below, Captain America will swim backstroke, Doctor Strange the breaststroke, Iron Man the butterfly, and Luke Cage the freestyle. They will swim in Heat 1, Lane 4.
