What Is Club Swimming?

ASL is a non-profit swim club, governed by a parent board and led by coaches. We have three full-time coaches now, whom I will introduce in a later email, working to provide a positive training environment for a wide range of athletes, from 6 year olds coming in from summer league swimming and looking to keep competing and having fun in the water, to 18 year olds looking to compete at a National level, or 18 year olds who’ve got passions that lay elsewhere, but still enjoy training with their ASL teammates and competing in meets to stay fit and ready for HS and Summer League seasons, and EVERYTHING in between!

We are a member of the Georgia Local Swimming Committee (LSC), which in turn is a part of the Southern Zone, which is a part of USA Swimming.

- USA Swimming is the governing body of the sport in the US, and is responsible for organizing National level competitions, resulting in the selection of our Olympic Teams every four years. USA Swimming is broken down into four Zones, of which we are a part of the Southern Zone.
- The Southern Zone covers the LSCs from Texas to North Carolina, roughly. The Southern Zone hosts a variety of meets geared towards helping athletes qualify and compete at National level competitions.
- Georgia Swimming, our LSC, is responsible for holding LSC Championships (here in Georgia, we simply call those meets, “States”, or “State Champs”), at both the Age Group and Senior Levels.

*I’ve attached a pdf with a Zone/LSC Map and a chart of how the meets flow.

Those championship meets listed above tend to happen in December, February/March, and July/August. There are many other competitions hosted by individual clubs like ASL, scattered throughout the year. Each team picks which of those meets they wish to attend amongst themselves, but when the LSC, Zone or National meets come around, they will have qualifying time standards that must be met in order to compete.

There are many different formats to the meets.

- An “In-House” meet is where it’s just ASL athletes competing for the practice/experience.
- We will also host meets that we call a “Timed Final Invitational” in which many teams will come in and we will compete in races by age group and gender, generally taking place over multiple sessions, but athletes will swim in ONE session per day, with the sessions being broken up by age/gender.
- The next level is a “Prelims/Finals Invitational” where athletes will compete in one session (Prelims), and the top 8/16/24/32 athletes, depending on the meet, will return in the evening for another session to compete in those races again (Finals). This format is also how championship meets for athletes 11 and up are run, so they give the athletes a good sense of how to be successful at the later meets.
- After that, we enter the Zone Meets, which consist of Section and Zone champs. They all will have qualifying times, and can take place anywhere in the Zone.
- Moving on up, we get into the National calendar, and those meets begin to narrow the field down, with the flow being 5 Futures Meets scattered around the country in July, 2 Junior Nationals in December (East/West) and one in late July, 1 National meet in December and August, and every four years, Olympic Trials, usually in June of that year.

That’s the big overview, but really, the ones that matter at the start are the local ASL hosted meets, and eventually the Georgia championships.

We will try to keep things as simple as possible at the start, running our first year and younger athletes primarily in the “In-House” meets, which will take place on six Saturday mornings between September and March, in our Aiken pool between 7am and 10am. In and out as quick and easy as we can.

We’ll also have all our athletes competing at our October and January meets in Augusta, which are the Timed Finals (October) and Prelims Finals format (January) as well as travel to Athens to compete at the UGA pool for our Divisional meet (a group of about 10 teams form the Northeast GA area, in a championship style meet, that is TONS of fun and cheering, with team themes each day, and some really exciting swimming at a great facility).

After that, we take a two-week break for the Masters/Spring Break, and then get back to training in mid April to prepare for Summer League and the Georgia Summer Championships, and by that point, you’ll all be veterans of the sport ;-)