At the beginning
of the Long Course season, we announced that we
would be increasingly moving towards the use of
the USA Swimming online Officials Tracking
System (OTS). The Officials Committee
recently met and we’ve set a goal of shifting
our database to OTS by the end of the year.
So what does this mean for everyone? Well,
lots of things:
First, we will no
longer be issuing the certification cards with
which you are all familiar. These cards
are going to be replaced by a
system generated card. If you have
national certification, you’ll recognize the
card on the right hand side of the sheet. What
is new is the ability to generate the VSI card
on the left. These are the cards that we
will use for 2010 certifications. They
will both be emailed to you and be available in
your account on the USA Swimming website (if you
haven’t yet created an account, now is a good
time to do so).
One thing you’ll
notice is that there’s no place to keep track of
sessions worked. That is because we are
going to be entering all of that data into OTS.
If you work at a meet sanctioned by VSI, the
information will automatically be added for you.
If you work at a meet in another LSC, it may or
may not be entered. The good news is that
many LSCs are moving towards the system, so it
will likely be the case. If not, you will
still have the ability to manually enter the
sessions.
This means that
there will be no more lost cards. It also
means that we’ve got to keep good records.
It would be a good practice to make sure that
you sessions have been added within a couple of
weeks of the meet.
For information
to get into OTS, three things must happen:
First, you must
be a registered member of USA Swimming.
Everyone who is a S&T Judge/Starter/Referee
meets this requirement, otherwise you can’t hold
certification in these positions by rule.
We strongly encourage our dry deck officials to
be registered members as well and we are pushing
to have this as a requirement. If you are
not registered, you are not in the system and
thus can’t be tracked. We haven’t decided
yet how to handle things if you fall in this
category, but it would be simplest if you could
register. For those of you who are Coaches
and Officials, please check both boxes on the
registration form. If you register as a
Coach only, you don’t show up in the Officials
database, although we can get to you with extra
work (but even at that we can’t include you in
reports).
Second, District
Chairs are going to set the meet up in OTS,
which requires a minimal amount of effort.
As part of the setup, the Meet Referee is added
and a Meet Administrator can be added, as well.
These individuals have the authority to add the
sessions worked for the meet.
Third, the Meet
Referee and/or Meet Administrator will need to
enter the sessions worked after the meet.
This would be an appropriate thing for the
Officials Chair of the host club/team to do,
especially if the Meet Referee isn’t from your
club. There are detailed instructions on
the website for doing this and we can help as
necessary. We distributed a spreadsheet
this summer for tracking this activity and that
is a handy method to use. The bottom line
is that good records will need to be kept during
the meet so that good information can go in
after the meet. These records and the meet
report should still come back to the LSC Chair
and the appropriate District Chair.
That’s a quick
snapshot for now. We’ll have more details
coming your way soon.
Thank you for your help with this transition.
We need
to clear up a point of confusion. If
you go into OTS to look for your VSI
certifications, you may not find them at
this point. Conversely, if you have
national certification, you will find that
information in the database.
The reason
that the VSI certifications are not in the
database is that we’ve got to manually add
all of them which we began a couple of weeks
ago. There are, however, 500 officials
that need to be added and we only have 7 of
us doing the entries, so please be patient.
Before the end of the year everything will
be there, as will your certification card.
There’s
likely to be some growing pains as we
transition to the new system and we’ll do
our best to keep you informed. In the
meantime, if you’ve got questions please let
us know. Chances are you aren’t the
only one.
On a related
note, we want to continue to encourage our
dry deck officials who are not registered
members of USA Swimming to become
registered. If you’re not registered,
you're not in the database!
Our championship season is upon us. We
need your help at all positions of all
meets.
If you can work any sessions, please let
your Team Officials Chair know or submit the
appropriate
Application to Officiate.
Please make sure to always check the
"Official" box on your USA Swimming
Non-Athlete Registration Form.
This applies to apprentices, too.
Every year!
