Bishop Tankers Take Part in "Telephone" Meet

WHEN A WINTER STORM struck northeastern Ohio on January 9, threatening the Ohio Wesleyan-Wooster swim meet scheduled for the following day, Battling Bishop head coach Dick Hawes reached back into the past to salvage the meet.

When it became apparent that the Fighting Scots would not be able to leave their campus, Hawes and Wooster head coach Rob Harrington agreed on a “telephone” meet, in which each team swam in its own pool and the two sets of results were compared and scored to produce a final set of results.

“I had set up for the meet on Friday night, so we were going to swim our events whether they were going to be here or not,” says Hawes. “As we talked through the morning, and (Harrington) said they weren’t going to come, I said we were going to swim our events and that all they had to do was swim their events, then send me the results and I’ll put them into the computer and score them.”

The meet went off without a hitch, and while Ohio Wesleyan got first-place finishes from junior David Gatz, freshman Nathan Eckersley, junior Kendra Klossner, junior Erin Hanahan, and freshman Marina Metzler, Wooster won both sides of the meet, defeating the Bishop women by a score of 146-85 and outscoring the men by a margin of 164-67.

“We had officials at both ends, and there was actually a disqualification here and a disqualification there,” Hawes says. “Everything was fine, and there were no issues. We would’ve had some really close races.”

While “telephone” meets are nothing new in college athletics, Hawes is keenly interested in using modern technology to expand upon that principle.

“We’ve wanted to try this. I’ve been in contact with Grinnell College in Iowa about doing a similar meet streamed live from both ends. I’m hoping in the future we can swim some official meets with schools we couldn’t travel to.”

The down side of a remote meet is that the head-to-head competition is lost. For a national-caliber swimmer such as Gatz, that could be the difference between swimming an automatic qualifying time and a provisional qualifying time—and perhaps missing the national championship meet.

“If you want top performance, that wouldn’t be an ideal situation,” Hawes says, “but you could run a couple of meets that way to save money. It’s feasible in a dual-meet system, but not for something that’s a championship meet. You’d lose a lot of the excitement and competitive edge.

“A lot of these dual meets are training opportunities as opposed to racing opportunities. Even though we didn’t have the head-to-head competition, this was a good experience leading up to what we want to do at the conference meet.”