GeekSwimmers offers a time benchmark feature to compare your times with time standards, resulting in a list of potential championships you may qualify for and how close you are to the ones you don't qualify yet. We don't store your data on our side, but we do use cookies to store, in your browser, some of your own choices. We also track the usage of the app through Google Analytics to know what works and what doesn't, so we can make improvements to your user experience.

We initially thought indicating for sure that you are qualified for a championship would be straightforward, but it turned out to be complex. After studying all the meet packages and learning the qualifying and de-qualifying criteria, we though it's better to limit the benchmark to time comparisons only, not risking inaccurate information due to sudden changes to those criteria. Therefore, we recommend to always check our results with your coach to validate possible qualifications.

Let's navigate through some of those criteria. For this season, starting with Western Region Short and Long Course Championships (WOSA), any short or long course standard time works to qualify you to a short or long course edition. However, if your time in one or more events are good enough to attend Ontario Festival Championships or Ontario Swimming Championships (OSC), then they de-qualify you from those WOSA events. You can quality for another event and still attend WOSA though, but if you decide to swim your fastest events there, they will put you in the exhibition category, which doesn't grant you any awards. The list of de-qualifying criteria goes on and on. For the Ontario Festival Championships, young swimmers with 2 or more OSC qualifying times are permitted to attend either the Ontario Winter Festival Championships or the Ontario Winter Youth-Junior (OYJ) Championships, but not both. Anyway, look how the rules change from a championship to another. It would be hard to cover all these special rules without working directly with Swim Ontario. It would also be hard to scale once we cover more provinces and countries.

So, we decided to keep things simple. We offer many ways to navigate through the standards in addition to the search with a time at hand. You can browse the standards per age, gender and course, as well as by event. To avoid showing too much information at once, we require these three criteria to be selected. Searching by standards helps swimmers and coaches to rapidly find the time they are aiming for before racing. Searching by event helps coaches to focus on only one event at a time during a meet. We expect the ways we offer to navigate through the standards may help in many other scenarios. Let us know if you have any other navigation ideas.

That's a good start for an app that is just beginning. We will keep improving based on user feedback to make sure we are providing the right information in the right way. Thanks for using GeekSwimmers and supporting our mission to help swimmers achieve their goals!