Glossary

Meet structure

• Event — a single race definition (e.g. “Girls 9–10 50 Free”).
• Heat — one running of an event; a pool’s worth of lanes.
• Lane — a swimmer’s position in a heat.
• Seed time — the time used to rank a swimmer for seeding (often a past result). NT (“no time”) means no seed time; NT swimmers seed last.

Seeding

• Seeding — assigning entries to heats and lanes. In Piranha it’s deterministic: same inputs → same heats/lanes.
• Center-out — lane order that puts the fastest swimmers toward the middle lanes of a heat.
• Circle seeding — spreading the fastest swimmers across the last few heats (used for championship prelims) instead of stacking them in one heat.
• Timed final — an event decided directly from the timed swim, with no separate finals round (IM, the 100s, and relays).

Meet types

• Dual / tri — two or three teams; lanes split by team.
• Championship — prelims + finals for sprint strokes; bigger, multi-session.
• Time trials — straight seeding by time, no team split.

Roles & lifecycle

• Clerk of the course — staff who check swimmers in before their event.
• DQ — disqualification, recorded with a code.
• Finalize — mark an event’s results official so it can be scored.
• Scratch — withdraw a swimmer from an event.