#1 Girls 8 & Under 25 Yard Freestyle:

This tells you the event number and what they will be swimming for that event. In this case it is event number 1, and in this event the 8 & under girls will be swimming the 25 yard Freestyle. This is typically typed in bold, and everything under it will be part of that event until you see another event in bold print.

Heat 1 of 3 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 3 total heats of this event.

The “Finals” part of it means that the fastest kid wins. At some meets there are Preliminaries and Finals, where kids swim first in Prelims, then the top swimmers swim again in Finals for placement (typically this is done in a separate evening session, after all prelims have been swum that day).

Some heat sheets will include an estimated start time. There also may be a separate timeline document included. Please remember these are always just estimates. Because some meets run faster or slower than anticipated, you and your swimmer should always be paying attention to the events and checking in with your coach to avoid missing a race.

Lane Number:

The number to the left of the name tells you which lane your swimmer will be in during their heat. How do you know which lane is which? At some pools it is clearly marked on the blocks, flags, or elsewhere. At other pools it is not clearly numbered.

The rules say that lane 1 is always supposed to be closest to the starter, but that is hard to see sometimes, so here is the trick: Envision yourself standing behind the blocks looking at the pool, whichever block is farthest to the right is almost always lane number 1. That’s not true 100% of the time, but almost all competitive pools are set up this way.

Name:

This is the name of the swimmer formatted as LAST, FIRST.

Age:

This is the swimmers age as far as the meet is concerned. This maybe different than your swimmer’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. The example team abbreviation is RACECO.

Seed Time:

Seed time refers to the fastest time the swimmer has ever swum this event in the past. Sometimes you’ll see a “NT” here which stands for “no time” because there is no record of the swimmer ever swimming the event before.

Sometimes you may see a time that is not actually your swimmer’s fastest time swum and this can due to one of two reasons. If your swimmer recently got a new best time, the entries may have been sent in before that time was recorded. Another possibility is that although your swimmer has swum the event in a faster time, they got DQ’d (disqualified) so the time did not officially count.

You may also see an “X” here next to the seed time, especially at dual meets. This means the swimmer is swimming exhibition. They can’t score, but their time will be recorded. Some meets only allow you to enter a certain number of swimmers to be eligible to score. With exhibition events the swimmers still get to swim even if they can’t score.

Seed times are important for a lot of reasons, but most importantly it is every swimmer’s goal to try to beat this time during each of their swims. If you beat your seed it is a good day regardless of where you place!