New Meet Maestro Features: Event Groups, Lane Assignments, and Sponsor Logos on Heat Sheets

While our teams have been busy with another great summer swim season, SwimTopia has been focused on new Meet Maestro features targeted at improving usability. 

Individual and Relay Event Groups

Meet Maestro is now able to handle running and scoring meets where multiple age groups or genders swim the same event together. For example, some teams mix all their older girls or boys together to race, so swimmers of similar speeds swim next to each other, but they want the age groups broken out for place ribbons and scoring. Meet Maestro now smoothly handles this situation, allowing events to be swum as, for example, the 11-18 Girls 50 Free, but scored and placed for the 11-12s, the 13-14s, and the 15-18s. In HyTek these events are called “Multi-Age” events; in SwimTopia and Meet Maestro, we call them “Individual Event Groups” or “Relay Event Groups,” since our easy interface allows you to group events that span different ages and/or genders to be swum together.

Often the decision to group events for racing is made at the league level, and is made before the meet is seeded. When events are “grouped,” seeding is based on time, so your older and younger swimmers (or boys and girls) will swim next to other kids of a similar speed, and all heats could contain a mix of ages and/or genders. Meet Maestro then scores and places the events as if they were swum separately.

Teams may decide to group events after running a preliminary heat sheet and seeing where it will save time if the events were swum together. It’s easy to Group events within the SwimTopia interface, then you can re-merge your meet.

Note: our Event Group feature is different to “combining heats,” which is usually done after the meet is seeded, and often only mixes ages and/or genders in the slowest heat. We hope to add the ability to easily and quickly “combine heats” in a future release of Meet Maestro.

New Seeding and Lane Assignments

Meet Maestro now has some new heat and lane assignment options to help make your meet setup easier and more flexible. 

• Individual and relay events can now have separate lane assignment settings. This makes it easy to, for example, seed relay events even/odd by team, while seeding individual events by entry time. 
• A new “manually assign lanes” option works well for tri-meets, allowing you to choose which teams go into which lanes. 
• And last but not least, teams now have more control over when and how lanes are assigned: flexibly to fill empty lanes, strictly for all heats, or in designated heats only.

Our new lane assignment options are designed to give teams more ways to balance fair and fun competition, while minimizing the meet’s duration. 

Easily Print Sponsor Logos on Meet Maestro Heat Sheets

Many teams like to use their heat sheets to recognize their sponsors, so we’ve created an easy way to put your sponsor logos onto the bottom of your Meet Maestro heat sheets. The way SwimTopia and Meet Maestro allow you to add a banner to your heat sheets is by simply uploading a custom image to your SwimTopia site and dropping it onto your heat sheets. The only limitation to your creativity is the size of the banner, which can be 700 pixels wide and no more than 150 pixels tall. 

For folks with the experience and the software, you can use an image editing program to customize your sponsor display any way you like; choose to display a thank you message as well as the logos, and size the logos to your preference. For those of us that don’t have those resources and skills ( 😁), a quick and easy way to generate an image is by using the Sponsor Snippet in the footer of your page template and then take a screenshot of that collection of sponsor logos. Once you have created and sized your image, you’ll upload it to SwimTopia in the Website > Sponsors area of your site. The option to display the sponsor logos is in the Heat Sheet report in Meet Maestro. Too easy!

We hope your team benefits from this new Meet Maestro features. As always, feedback is welcome, email hello@swimtopia.com.