Scoring an A Meet - A Tutorial (from last year's blog, and a great help for new swim families)

Greetings Gator Nation!  I am stealing this from our previous blogger, Glen Bolger, because I think it is a great help to those new to NVSL A meet swimming on how the A meet scoring goes.  It's an easy read and hope it answers any questions you may have.

For those new to NVSL A Meet swimming, the scoring at an A meet is relatively simple.  Each event is worth nine points -- five for first, three for second, and one for third.  Each individual stroke totals 90 points -- so all freestyle events add up to 90 points total.  That means there are 360 points in the individual events (that is 90 points times the four events -- free, back, breaststroke, and fly).

There are twelve relays.  The winning team scores five points per relay, while the loser of the relay scores 0.  A sweep of the relays -- I've never seen it happen -- would be a 60-0 win.  A split means each team wins six relays, so the relay scores were tied at 30 to 30.

Thus, there are 420 points generally scored in a swim meet.  So that means 211 points are needed to win the meet.  There can be 210-210 ties.  It happens.

To get to 211, every point counts -- which is why cheering on a Gator swimmer locked in a close battle for third place is more important than cheering for an MVPer who is cruising to an easy win.  A 6-3 victory adds up quicker than a 5-4 win. 

(Editor's Note: Thanks, Blogger Obvious!)

And, that also means that if the other team cruises to an easy win in an event, taking second and third place to limit the damage to 4-5 is very important.  A sweep, which doesn't happen often in A meets, is special because of the 9-0 boost it provides the team.