Where is the league scoreboard?

IS the pwswim site coming back?

Will we ever have the league summary sheet again? (UPDATE: SwimTopia helped us create a new Summary Sheet! See the numbers from 2025 Divisionals on the Documents page.)

I’m John, the PWSL’s computer lead. With two weeks down in our SwimTopia era, these are the most frequent questions I’ve received from teams and families; I want to answer them in one place, so there’s transparency and zero confusion. Send your friends to this post.

Long story short: As cool as they were, and as much as we miss them, they required too many hours to keep minimally functional, and were unsustainable, likely to break completely.

Long story long: I completely understand why people are missing these features. I am endlessly grateful to the people who built the website and summary sheet generator; if you see me in person I’ll call them out by name and sing their praises.

Unfortunately, despite making the site as automated as possible, it required a lot of care and feeding behind the scenes. I won’t go into every specific issue here, but it could take most of every Sunday, all summer long, to ensure everything worked right. If I had Sunday plans, I knew I’d have impatient email queries waiting for me at home. Last year there was a problem with meet data that took hours of investigation across two weeks to solve before everything worked again.

Even when it all worked right, and even though I’d built up adequate knowledge over the past few years to figure out most problems with meet data and fix them, the day was coming when the site and tools would be beyond my ability to fix. Knowing how long it took to write the first time, and having been warned what ongoing work would be needed to maintain it, I could not in good conscience ask anyone to do it for free.

And speaking of “beyond my ability to fix,” that was true of many other tools we were using. DQs stopped reporting correctly on the Summary sheet, and I had nothing I could do but stop using that column. Our deck cards, the weekly top times, and the cyber ribbons all depended on software written by a dedicated volunteer 15+ years ago. If any of it stopped working - and there was always a chance the next Windows or HyTek update would break it - we would’ve had to figure out a new way to run meets on zero notice.

My motto in any major volunteer role is, “be recruiting your replacement every day.” When I realized that these features required someone with years of swim software experience, a background in IT, and endless free time just to keep things working week to week - I don’t know anyone in PWSL who could take this on, and I wouldn’t ask them to.

So what’s next? SwimTopia (IMO) has been a capable solution, and even better, they are responsive, understanding, and willing to work with us to get these “nice to have” features, without imposing on unpaid volunteers.

I have shared our old pwswim.org site with SwimTopia and told them that level of detail in a “scoreboard” would be ideal, even if it’s not available until after each meet is over. They are working on a league scoreboard feature in the “short to medium term.” It’s a popular request with their leagues. This will give us some level of league results, but I don’t know specifically what depth it will feature or when.

In the meantime, I post every meet’s full PDF results and the traditional top times reports to the website each week. They may be painfully manual compared to what we’re used to.

We’ve also asked every team to make their meets “public” in the SwimTopia app, where full live results are available for every meet with a “PRO” subscription, and are viewable later. I’ve suggested that SwimTopia add a league interface to the app that would make league meets available without searching. For next year, if that doesn’t happen, the league will standardize meet names to make them easier to find through the search bar. I don’t pretend this is equivalent to what we’ve had in the past and I hate that the PRO app is an additional burden to families; but as I hope I made clear, the “free” option was a house of cards, not sustainable long term.

The “Meet Summary” report is available in Meet Maestro for each meet; so the data from the old spreadsheet is there. I’m working with SwimTopia Customer Happiness to figure out the best way to get this data and present it. I have also asked a couple computer reps if they can help with automation; but as noted, I will not ask a volunteer to give up days/weeks of their free time, and if you see it again it will be automated to the point where I can confidently pass it on to the next person in my role with only a few minutes of weekly work.

I hope that answers these questions! Thanks to all of you who dedicate free time to your teams and swimmers every week. You keep this league running and it’s a pleasure to support you.

-John