I am trying to get more into the swim mom thing. I have a kid on the high school aquatics team, and my other two are on a club team. And of course we love our summer league team!!
My daughter got to swim her last 25s at her last meet. I was excited for her to swim and try to get the best times possible since those will be her last official 25 yard races.
My next step as a swim mom is to get IMR and IMX scores. They stand for IM Ready and IM Xtreme and are metrics used by USA Swimming. Each is a series of five events that you are scored on so that you can see how you stack up against other swimmers. If I didn’t make this my new goal, I would probably let the kids just swim 50s and the 100 IM. This will push them to try longer races and help me to have some good goals of things to sign them up for.
Right now I have it planned so that both kids will swim all 5 IMR events in October. Then I can start planning to get them into IMX events and then we can continue to work on getting faster times once we hit those. As a lover of Evernote, I now have notes set up for each kid to track how they do at events and track their best times for their IMR/IMX events for the season.
I am not planning to be focused on times but rather getting the events in. Even if they have swam the events before, it resets for each season on Sept 1. And of course my daughter just aged up so she’s going from being the oldest swimming 25s to the youngest in the 9-10 group.
Here are the events and planned dates for my daughter to finish all of her IMR events:
▫️100 Free (swimming 10/2)
▫️50 Back (swimming 10/2)
▫️50 Breast (swimming 10/12)
▫️50 Fly (swimming 10/2)
▫️100 IM (swimming 10/12)
And for my son:
▫️200 Free (swimming 10/2)
▫️50 Back: 43.01 (he already has a time for this season but will swim again 10/2)
▫️50 Breast (swimming 10/12)
▫️50 Fly (swimming 10/2)
▫️100 IM (swimming 10/12)
USA Swimming has motivational time standards for all of the events by age. Once we get all of the events in, we will start looking at where we can potentially hit various time standards. That’s the next step. Texas Swimming Association also has championship qualification time standards. Those are some tough times, but we will also look to see if there are any we are close to. And when we feel completely frustrated, we can look at Champ and Reserve times for our summer swim league since those are easier to make and really why we started swimming in the first place.
First goal, however, is to get my kiddos into all 10 events this season (5 IMR and 5 IMX). We have very busy schedules, and I have been haphazard in how I select events for meets so this will be a good goal. The IMX events are much longer races so we will see how we get those sprinkled into future meets.
Honestly, I am just glad I am finally paying attention. I still want it to be fun, but this will encourage me to get them in the right kinds of events for the year-round league.