Dear Clubs and members of the Australian swimming community,
With warmer weather starting to set in across the country, I hope you’re looking forward to hitting your local pool or beach to enjoy a swim with family and friends.
I wanted to take this opportunity to inform you of the recent positive developments in Swim Central, albeit understanding and recognising there are still ongoing challenges within our new operating system. These changes include the release of several new functionalities which are detailed below. I fully acknowledge that we are still tackling glitches to improve usability and want to reiterate that we appreciate your patience while we continue to enhance the system to ultimately reach its true vision and benefit to our sport.
The Swim Central system is now live across six states and territories and ASCTA, with Western Australia set to make the transition in 2020. As a result, ClubLANE and MyLane have now been shut down, marking a pivotal point in the process and a huge achievement for the whole team involved across the country behind the transition of data.
Further, since I last wrote, we undertook with our service provider to urgently adjust the back-end architecture of the system to accommodate some storage and speed issues that were unexpectedly occurring. This was a significant piece of work which, whilst not immediately customer facing, we assessed was needed to best address user experience moving forward.
Families of multiple swimmers will be happy to hear that a recent release has streamlined the meet nominations process. Improvements to this process include the addition of eligible ages per race, making it easier to identify whether it’s an age or open event, while seed entry times are now listed above each race too.
The new Coach Results portal on the entity home page now enables coaches, as well as clubs, to access and review results data over time for up to ten participants. Being able to compare and analyse data will no doubt help shape important decisions for both the athlete and coach. This tool is available by selecting coaching within the entity home section.
In more good news, Results Central has a new home and can now be accessed via Swim Central as well as the Swimming Australia website. We have genuinely appreciated your patience while we’ve transitioned Results Central to Swim Central and thank you in advance as we continue to work on updating this search tool.
Clubs can now utilise web URLs for each meet, meaning they can easily share and promote their events via social media channels, emails and text messages. For participants to have direct access to an event through a simple link makes it easy for them to enter, and will hopefully help maximise the number of competitors at meets for clubs.
I am also pleased to announce on the horizon there are additional functionalities to be released in Swim Central including a live recognition feature for young swimmers taking part in the Bio Island Australian Junior Excellence program, as well as members having the ability to nominate relay competitors for meets.
As you would have seen from their regular communications to you all, state and territory swimming associations and ASCTA have created a range of resources to ensure a smooth transition and implementation of these updates for both club administrators and participants. There’s a central portal on the Swimming Australia website which can direct you to the most relevant resources, information and contact points for your local area.
Of course, as mentioned in July, creating and transitioning all states and territories to Swim Central has been a huge and complex undertaking. As with many large-scale projects of this kind, unexpected developments have tested us and we’re still overcoming challenges along the way. However, please be assured we’re prioritising the remaining tasks at hand to make progress and constantly update the operating system to maximise its capability and user experience.
Once again, we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding while we continue to update and improve Swim Central and thank you for all that you do for the great sport of swimming.
Leigh Russell,
CEO Swimming Australia
