Swimmers aren’t the type of athletes that get into fights all the time. We’re a fairly civilized breed of athletes so to speak, but mess with our swim meets and it’ll get ugly. The Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Assosiation (MIAA) cancelled their Sectional meets this weekend due to the huge snowstorm. Swimmers all over Massachusetts are not happy and are taking all the energy they have from their tapers and putting it into fighting this cancellation.
Sarah Breland took her anger to twitter and formed the “Bring Back MA Sec” twitter account (@bringbackMAsec). Breland tried to contact the MIAA herself but was shocked when she received a cold reply.
“I had directly emailed the MIAA with my story this morning,” Breland recounted. “Moments later I got an automatic response basically stating that they don’t care about the parents or athlete’s emails. They said that they only want to hear from Principals and Athletic Directors; both of mine had emailed them.”
Swimmers like Breland have been fighting and getting some high level support from the likes of American Olympians Ryan Lochte, Missy Franklin, Conor Dwyer, Allison Schmitt, and Katie Ledecky on twitter. Partly from their support the MIAA has decided to reinstate the West sectional meet, great news for the west swimmers but the east swimmers are still fighting for their right to swim.
Simon Rogers has been swimming for Malden High School for three years and as a senior, this meet would have been his last sectionals ever. Unfortunately Rogers was told by his highschool coach that he and his team wouldn’t have a chance to compete at the meet, and that it was cancelled for good. Rogers said, “It was devastating to hear that we had worked so hard all season for this, and now it wasn’t going to happen. The meet was not postponed like some events for other sports, so swimmers on my team who had made times that allowed them to swim in Massachusetts sectionals but not for states would have nothing to go to now, their season was essentially over.”
Take a minute to remember your swimming days. Imagine you trained all your life for one meet, one chance, envisioned it all your life and then one day it was cancelled. For swimmers like Simon Rogers, unless this meet is reinstated, it might mean the end of their swimming careers.
I urge the swimmers to continue their fight to the right to swim, and as swimmers we know that they’ll fight until that last inch.
a few years ago, in Texas, several of the regional swim meets (which were qualifying meets for the State meet) had to be postponed for a week. The swimmers were all disappointed, but the coaches ratcheded up their yardage and they stayed ready to race. Usually, all 8 regions race on the same 2 days; however, in this case, I think about 3-4 regions had to move to the following weekend with State the following weekend (rather than the 2 week gap as usual). That was tough – but most did well. To have a meet cancelled and not postponed is completely unfair to the swimers. Fight on!
Note: New Hampshire held their swimming championships today.
Harvard held it re-scheduled meet versus Penn today.
MIAA did not see fit to run their Sectional Meet at MIT today (pool was booked)
Wrong about Harvard….meet pushed back to Saturday February 16th.
The roads are fine now. They could have had the boys sectionals tomorrow (sunday) and could have added the girls into it.
The MIAA should have had a back up plan. I respect their descion to cancel the meet for the safety for all of the swimmers, families, coaches, and others. But they have not bothered to try to come up with a new plan of action. For some seniors it was their last chance to make states but now they will not be able to end their season on the high note they wanted. We have trained so hard for this moment only to get it taken away.
We need our voices heard. All Swimmers and non-swimmers unite. This meet means a lot to everyone especially to the seniors, if they didn’t qualify for states this is their last chance to try!
No one expected anybody to travel on Saturday (the roads don’t open until 2 pm)….the proposed solution was to run ALL of the meets on Sunday. In the North Central/South districts the MIT pool is booked for Sunday. The original plan is run 10 lanes Girls (2 districts) Sat and Boys (2 districts) on Sunday. One solution is to run 20 lanes (this is routine for NE Swimming Championships) and North (Boys/Girls) in the AM and Central/South (Boys/Girls) in the PM. You might have to eliminate the awards ceremony but it should work within the timeline.
Whoa, where did all the comments on this post go? I guess I’ll re-post?
I made a spreadsheet looking at the kids who’ve qualified for sectionals but not for states. View / download here.
Turns out there are a lot more kids than I initially expected, about 25% of kids in the four meets that haven’t been rescheduled yet.
As I was winging my last post, I thought of just moving the girls state meet (currently scheduled for the 16th, next Saturday) back a day, and then just swimming all the sectional qualifiers w/o state cuts all together somewhere on Saturday and holding all the state meets the next day. But it is a… Read more »
Oh, well, there they are. Now I just look silly.
I was curious how many kids actually are gettin’ bumped from events because of these cancellations; it was a lot more than I initially expected. Just counted up how many entrants there were in each event, how many kids were entered w/o times that would qualify them for the state meet and the percentage of kids in each event.
Spreadsheet I made is uploaded here. I think that link’ll work…if not let me know and I can like, email it to you or something. I also didn’t check it too closely, I literally just counted things…too lazy to automate it.
Of the meets that weren’t rescheduled, there were 951 individual entries. 244 have not qualified… Read more »
Also, don’t scroll down too far on the Bring Back MA Sec. twitter account. Actually, I take that back, please do – the transition in subject matter once you get to stuff posted longer than 24 hours ago is pretty fantastic. (Ms. Breland appears to be a fan of One Direction. And I mean, who can blame her!?)
I need an extra strength Advil to cure headache after taking your advice and reading her twitter feed…the stuff before her meet was cancelled. Not sure why, but feel like downloading Emblem 3 and One Direction….maybe buying a pepsi. When is X factor back on the air?