Swimmingly

I am the starter/ref at swim meets in our league. All 22 teams use Swimmingly to run their meets and I can’t begin to tell you how many headaches this app continues to save me. Teaching the volunteers before the meets is a lot of fun and the timers truly enjoy it. Can you imagine not having to worry about a start...ever? Amazing. Of course with any new technology there is a learning curve! It is so much easier to learn than what is out there today. Not to mention, the Swimmingly team has the BEST support whenever you need it!

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I was the starter at a swim meet using Meet Central tonight and it was, to be kind, a boondoggle. The system has too many failure points to be a viable product. We stopped using the system after multiple fails (meaning starter getting knocked off of the system; watches/iPhones not starting; timers phones dropping off of the system. We switched to manual watches and completed our meet, but you can imagine the results are a mess because Meet Central does not integrate with Meet Manager. To the developers: it is completely unreasonable to expect timers to not switch out of the app at some point in the meet. You are not going to change the way people use their phones. You need to develop an app that fits into the current iPhone ecosystem. Developers: Why does everybody use the same Huddle number? What happens if multiple people try to join as “starters?” Developers: The starter and the meet ref should be able to see how many timers and stroke and turn judges are connected to the system. Developers: Why does it take so long for you to get 16 timers logged into the system? Me thinks Meet Central developers have never worked on transaction processing systems that need to be highly reliable and fault tolerant. If you are a swim team, my advice is that this system is way too unreliable to use at this point.

The team behind this app has a passion for summer swimming, and a vision for how it can be better for the whole summer swim community. Last year was our first year using the app, and it was a great improvement over the old system. That said, we had a lot of end-of-season feedback about how it could be better. Nice to see a lot of that has been incorporated into version 5.0. Can’t wait to see how things run this year!

Our league has used Meet Central for several years now, and it just keeps getting better and better. As with any change there were some growing pains at the beginning, but I can attest that if you stick with it you will never go back to all the paper and manual entry. It has truly been a game changer at every level, from the individual teams to administration of the league as a whole.

Meet Central is more than the app. The entire system is a welcome and needed update to the sport of swimming and will continue to revolutionize the administration and overall experience of swim meets. The app is how the user interacts with the Meet Central system. It’s very simple and intuitive and delivers a great user experience. In the summer swim season, it is the most useful app on my phone.