How to mark a swimmer's arm for a swim meet

So you’ve signed up for your first summer swim experience, and now your child is about to have her first meet. How do you make sure she gets where she needs to go? Nobody wants to be ‘that’ parent and have their child’s arm look like this: 

How is your child going to get to her race with THAT? The first step to getting your swimmer ready to compete is marking their Event, Heat, and Lane (or EHL for short). 

The first thing you’ll need to do is purchase a copy of the Heat Sheet, the seeding sheet that tells you when and where your swimmer is to compete. The heat sheet is comprised of little groupings of “heats” that each may look something like this: 

Events, listed numerically, are usually categorized by gender and age. Note, that they do not always start at 1. Check out “A”  above to see where you would find the Event Number.

Heat information can be found listed below the event line, and tell you the groupings of entrants. These groupings are usually based on seed times. There are often multiple heats of an event and specific heats will be listed as “Heat x of x”. Pay special attention to your child’s assigned heat, located at “B”. 

Lane assignments can be found listed vertically (“C”) and indicate the respective lanes in which the swimmers will compete. Lane assignments will sometimes start with a 0 and sometimes with a 1, depending on the pool. 

Once you’ve identified all of your swimmers’ races, it’s time to mark their event (E), heat (H), and lane (L) in an easy to read format. Most parents chose to organize this information on their child’s arm, via a water-proof, permanent marker, making it easy for their child to frequently check when they are to be swimming. This grid will look something like the one below: 

This Swim Grid shows what a completely filled out EHL should look like. In our version of the Swim Grid, we added a fourth column to add a description of the stroke, and/or position on a relay if you so choose. 

With your child’s EHL filled out, they should be more than ready to be where they need to be, when they need to be there. EHL is part of the swim meet experience, and removes some of the fear and anxiety kids have when starting out in the sport. It provides a safety net, that they can fall back on when they lose track of where they are. It also provides assistance to bullpen monitors and volunteers, charged with helping the kids get to their events in an orderly and timely fashion. No one wants to be the person who has to tell a 6 year old they missed their only opportunity to swim for the entire session.

Part of the experience of swimming, comes through having fun and competing. Missing events is never fun, and marking your swimmers’ EHL, helps provide you and your athlete the assurance that your athlete will be where they need to be to gain competitive experience.