GRADED SWIMMING

Introduction

Our sport offers great opportunities to the most successful, with the chance of competing in foreign countries for club or even country. But competitive swimming is for all levels of ability.

Graded Swimming was introduced in its present form in 1980 in order to provide incentive to ALL of the swimmers in the sport. It does this by creating the means to compare performances across the many available events and across all age groups.

Graded Swimming gives all swimmers the means to measure their own personal progress and also to compete in open competitions against swimmers of similar ability.

How does it work ?

The system has four Grades which are AAA, AA A and B. Everyone below B grade is automatically a C grade. For a given time, for each of the standard events and for each sex there is a corresponding Grade.

AAA Grade is approximately the same level as the National Championships qualifying times, AA grade is about District standard, A is about county standard, and B is good club swimmer standard, C is all of the rest.

The system has been used for many years in Canada, USA and Germany, where it is normal for swimmers to know their grade for each event, and their overall grade.

When it was brought to this country the basis for determining grades was scientifically worked out so that it was automatically kept in line with improving world standards and so that any possibility of bias towards one event or age group was removed.

A set of tables has been developed which cater for both sexes, for all Age groups and for all events. To determine the grade of a swim is simply a matter of comparing your latest time against the times in the table for your sex, age group and event.

Use of the tables allows a swimmer to compare performances on all of the possible events, which often produces surprising results, in that it can highlight much earlier in a swimmers career special ability in the longer or tougher events which are not often competed for at the younger ages.

There are two major ways in which the notion of grading swimmers can be of real benefit:

Firstly in the organisation of swim meets such that ability levels are similar

Secondly as a personal incentive system for each swimmer.

Meet Organisation

An increasing number of meets are now held using the Graded Swimming system. The usual feature of Graded meets is that each event and age group has both a lower AND an upper qualifying time limit. These times will have been determined by reference to the Graded Swimming tables and usually all events in the meet will be of the same grade.

The most frequent meets are at 'B' Grade, which is of especial benefit to those swimmers who have not yet reached the higher grades that are catered for by county and district championships. The great attraction of a graded meet is also that every one who enters knows that they will be racing against someone of similar ability - which is so much better than the traditional inter club event where it is so easy to win or lose by a large margin.

There is some important advice for organisers of graded meets to appreciate:

A graded meet is about individuals being given the opportunity to measure their progress and to aim for the objective of moving up a grade.


For this reason achievement of a grade higher than that entered is worthy of note and, if appropriate, reward.

It is not, therefore, appropriate to use a graded meet as a competition between clubs AND especially not to introduce disincentives by 'punishing' swimmers, who achieve a higher grade, by not including their swim in a point scoring system.

Personal Incentive

The basis of Graded swimming in Canada, which has not yet caught on to the same extent in this country, was the notion of a swimmer being able to identify with a Grade. The incentive is the desire to move up to the next Grade. Each Club may invent its own set of conditions but the most typical for overall Grade is as follows:-

The swimmer is timed and graded on as many events as possible. To be of a given overall grade the swimmer must have the grade:-

1. on a minimum of three events
2. At least two different strokes
3. At least one event of 100 metres or greater.

Thus it would not be possible to achieve an overall grade by doing all the swims on one stroke, nor by doing 50 metres on three different strokes.

Many coaches now also use the Graded Tables to assist with the allocation of swimmers to squads, in which case they would set their own rules such as:-

1. Grade at 400 metres freestyle

2. Grade at 200 metres I.M.

3. Best Grade on first choice stroke.

For the swimmer who is not going to make the top striving to improve ones overall Grade can make all the hours of training much more worthwhile, and often maintain interest until the opportunity to race over the longer or tougher events comes along, or strength or
height has increased.

The latest 2005 Edition of the graded tables has been revised to be consistent with the principles underlying the BAG Category system. BAG categories offer a much finer measure of individual overall performance appropriate to scoring within a competition or series of meets. The Graded Swimming system is more appropriate to general
performance evaluation and specifically to progression with age. But because these new editions are consistent between BAG categories and Grades the choice is now very much with the coach and what is best for any individual group of swimmers.