A very special thank you to Barb Ship for her excellent work creating these training videos for the league. Thanks, Barb!
The entire playlist is available here. The videos will auto-play in order. The individual videos with notes are listed below.
| Title | Notes |
|
Meet Manager (MM) 7 is being used. MCSL uses MM 8. Where differences exist, they will be noted here. The screen that the video shows at 1:10 is from the Pro license version. In the version used by MCSL, you will not see this screen. Ignore the part about selecting Admin as the user name. You'll go directly to the screen you see at 1:48. At 2:49 she talks about sets of DQ codes. In MM 4, there's only one set of DQ codes, so you can ignore this. At 4:25 there's a communications error dialog box displayed. This won't happen with MCSL's version of MM 8. |
|
|
When downloading MM templates, always look for files for the current year. If the current year isn't available yet, do not use prior years. 2:30 to 3:45 is just unzipping files, you might want to skip ahead. At 4:35: again, ignore the login User Name screen in the video. You won't see this in the MCSL version of MM 8. |
|
|
If there are any records broken during the season, we will provide an updated records file on the MCSL automation page. |
|
|
|
|
|
Award labels are Avery part number 5160 or equivalent. |
|
|
Note her advice at 3:30 about hiding the team scores. Unfortunately this doesn't work on MM 4. The easiest thing to do is to grab the horizontal border above the team scores and slide it down to hide the team scores. Typically "Score" is used after each event. For 2021 A meets, "List" will be used for the 19 year old events. For other meets that aren't scored (Time Trials, B meets), use "List" instead of "Score". |
|
|
|
|
|
At 3:30 the USA Swimming ID and birth date columns are minimized, but this is just for the sake of the training video. Normally you'd want to display these when setting up and running a meet. At 5:30 the big blue box is covering the USA Swimming ID and birth date columns. Again, this is just for the training video. |
|
|
|
|
|
Hand-written changes to the entries aren't very common, but they're legal as long as they're on the written copy of the entries. So this is an important section. |
|
|
|
|
|
For 2021 and beyond, the event numbers for the relays have changed, but otherwise all of this advice is aplicable. |
|
|
Make sure that the reps or coaches tell you if the away team has selected the even or odd lanes. With the MCSL version of MM, you should never see the popup displayed at 2:50. |
|
|
We usually print a double column meet program for the announcer, and triple column programs for other officials. The announcer gets the double column version so that names aren't truncated. You might want to check with your rep to see what your team normally does. The glich with All Star times may be because All Star times hadn't been imported into the database. The template files you will download from mcsl.org should already have the All Star times loaded. |
|
|
The advice at 2:30 for printing 2 lanes at a time is very good. It will save you a ton of time because you won't have to re-collate the lane timer sheets. |
|
|
Scratches will be entered after the scratch meeting with the referee, reps, and coaches. You should take notes in the meeting which you'll then use to enter the scratches and substitutes. After I enter the scratches in MM, I then make the same corrections on the lane/timer sheets, and only after that do I hand them off to the head timer. |
|
|
MM 4 doesn't have the Ctrl-Y functionality mentioned at 7:02. Sadly. |
|
|
You should get the relay cards, listing the relay swimmers, at the same time you get the completed lane/timer sheets. If you don't get them, you might have to go to the timers and track them down. |
|
|
|
|
|
Again, Ctrl-Y doesn't work with MM 4. You can grab the horizontal window frame above the "Team Score" label and re-size it so that nothing shows. I typically do not include the running score on each event's printed results page. |
|
|
|
|
|
We'll make new records files available during the seasons if MCSL records are broken. You can import these into your remaining meet templates when you set up each week's meet. |
|
|
I typically back up the meet Friday night when I'm done with the setup. I then email that file to the other team and have them load it on to their computer, and have them bring that computer to the meet. If there's a disaster with our computer, we can use the other team's computer. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Note that team and pool records files are typically loaded during meet setup. Common symbols for records are "+", "@", and "$". As noted in the video, "*" is not good because it's easily confused with All Star times. |