2025 ASA Season Meeting 1 Recap and Recording

March 14, 2025

Teams,

Thank you for taking part in our first organizational meeting of the year. A recap of the meeting can be found at ASA Meeting Recording. Also please view the 2025 ASA Rankings. The Power Point presentation can be found at ASA Meeting 1 Presentation . Don't forget to complete your team status survey at the link listed below by March 25. Other helpful links from the meeting are as follows.

League Webpage:asa.swimtopia.com

Teams Page on League Webpage: asa.swimtopia.com/asa-teams

Instructions on setting up team page:Team Info Page Editing Instructions

Designating Reps, Coaches and Computer People - Designating People to Roles

(This ensures your team reps, coaches and computer people are in the communication loop with ASA)

Background Check Instructions:Background Check Instructions

Team Status Survey

We still need team status forms from the following teams below. This is crucial info we need about your team to complete the schedule. Please click on the Team Status Survey link and take care of this ASAP if you are one of the teams listed below. If you do not complete this form, your team may not be included on this year's schedule.

Rules Proposal for 2025 and Ballot

We had two rules proposals for 2025. One that applies to participation rules and one that applies to scheduling. Details and some context are listed below.

Rule Proposal 1 - Create a provision in the scheduling guidelines to permit a home and away meet in the same season for teams meeting the following 2 criteria. A team size of over 175 swimmers and ranking score of over 35 ranking points.

Rationale/Context - The rationale behind this is to have some of the bigger teams swim each other twice in a season, once at home and once away. This would take the burden of swimming some of the mega teams in the league off of significantly smaller teams, as well as allow those larger teams to swim each other at pools that are better suited for large teams. In many cases, the smaller teams cannot host the much larger team due to facility limits. This would not make the schedule for all of the larger teams exclusively against each other, but would allow for this to be possible for one of their meets during the season.

Rule Proposal 2 - Allow a change to participation rules on page 10 of the rule book, item 5 J, capping the maximum number of individual events a swimmer may swim of 4 events under the existing extra event rule. The current rule allows swimmers to swim every individual event in some cases when certain conditions are met. This rule would limit the number of events to a total of 4 events. The same conditions to allow the extra events to be swum would still need to be met in order to allow the extra events to be swum.

Rationale/Context -

The reasoning behind this proposal is that under current rules, a swimmer could have to swim up to 8 events in one meet. This is quite a workload for a swimmer, even in a long meet involving shorter events. Additionally there has been some discussion of teams gaming the system and having swimmers not compete in meets to open certain better swimmers to compete in more events. On the other side of the rule, an argument against this is that it would limit smaller teams ability to cover open spots in their lineups against bigger teams. It creates theoretically a 14 point opportunity in each age/gender group where a team does not have enough swimmers to cover all scoring lanes.

Please use the following link to submit your vote - ASA Rules Change Ballot

Please one vote per team. A majority of teams in the league must approve passage of this proposal for the change to be enacted. Please submit your vote no later than April 1.

Upcoming ASA Meetings and Training

Remaining ASA Meeting Dates and Links

2025 ASA Rules Clinic – Thursday, April 17, at 6:30 pm. This meeting will cover a thorough review of league rules and some meet processes.

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/93804786502

Meeting ID: 938 0478 6502

One tap mobile

+19292056099,,93804786502# US (New York)

+13017158592,,93804786502# US (Washington DC)

2025 May Ribbon Distribution and Meet Procedure Review - Weds. May 7 at 7 pm at Marist Teams can pick up their ribbons for the season on this date. This meeting will be in person and is specifically designed to walk teams through the process of running a swim meet. We will cover an in depth review of all of the jobs involved in running a swim meet and the process flow of how all of these jobs interact amongst each other.

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/93804786502

Meeting ID: 938 0478 6502

One tap mobile

+19292056099,,93804786502# US (New York)

+13017158592,,93804786502# US (Washington DC)

Required Coaches Meeting - A mandatory coaches meeting for rules review that at least one member from each team’s staff must attend one of the offered sessions. (Dates: Sunday, May 18 at 3:00 p.m. at Marist Pool or Sunday May 25 at 3:00 p.m. at Marist Pool).

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/93804786502

Meeting ID: 938 0478 6502

One tap mobile

+19292056099,,93804786502# US (New York)

+13017158592,,93804786502# US (Washington DC)

More Swimtopia Training Webinars for the Upcoming Season

We have already had one Webinar covering team page setup and registration. Below are some future topics we will cover in greater detail to let teams get the most out of their Swimtopia accounts and hopefully make your seasons easier from an organizational standpoint.

Registration and Team Page Setup

Thank you for taking part in our Swimtopia webinar recently. Special thanks to Tracy Nelson from Swimtopia for conducting a great introduction to their platform and providing a wealth of helpful information to get teams rolling on using Swimtopia for the 2025 season. As promised here are links to a recording of last nights Zoom call Swimtopia ASA Registration Webinar Recording Below are links to a number of other helpful resources to help teams new to Swimtopia become familiar with their platform and get your registration set up for the coming season.

Tracy has come up with a great set of instructions for teams to help get your registration set up for the 2025 season. Please click on Registration Setup Steps for the 2025 Season. These steps should help ensure you include the appropriate league fees and waivers for your swimmers when creating your registration. Please review these instructions carefully before opening your registration for the 2025 season, and feel free to reach out to Swimtopia for customer support if you have any questions via their help center Swimtopia Help Center or at [email protected]

Volunteer Management - Helpful links, including a recording of the webinar are below

Here's a link to the recording from the webinar: SwimTopia -- Volunteer Management

Here's a link to the volunteering section in our Help Center: Volunteering

And a couple of helpful blog posts -- here are the links:

Volunteer Signups: How Does Your Team Manage Them?

5 Tips and Tools for Better Volunteer Management

Meet Entry/Roster Management and Reporting

Wednesday, April 16, 6:30pm - 7:30pm EDT

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89524454660?pwd=J7EPtWQzH67j2yfKau314Y7Qt5ozsE.1

Meet Maestro Training

Saturday, May 3, 10:00am - 12:00pm EDT

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85413509721?pwd=KqBqE00SbKsPSf8n5wYh4j8inO4VCc.1

We will send reminders of these meetings as they approach, but figured we'd get them on your radar now. As always we will record these meetings and make them available to teams via e mail and the league website.

In the meantime, existing support videos are already in place and will give you a great tour of many of the features of Swimtopia and Meet Maestro. These can be found at Webinar Video Guide - Topic-Focused Training. They cover important topics like customizing your team page, setting up your volunteer roles for the coming season, Swimtopia's communication tools to text and e mail your team members, setting up team registration for the upcoming season, completing your weekly lineups, and a host of other helpful topics. Additional Swimtopia training resources can be found at ASA Swimtopia Training Links and Tutorials

We are really excited about a return to swimming and the fun that your teams offer your families and the community. Please stay tuned, as we will do our best to provide you as much info and guidance as possible. If you have any questions in the meantime, please don't hesitate to call or e mail as we are always happy to help.

Thank you again,

Franke Marsden 

ASA

404-664-3975

[email protected]