It seems hard to imagine now, but meets weren't always automated. Before 1996--the year MCSL switched over completely to computers--Friday afternoons or nights meant time spent with a typewriter (or very strong hand), 5-part forms, and pink and blue cards. Here's a picture of the blank white/top copy of the dual meet score sheet and the pink copy filled out:
And two close ups:
When coaches met at the home pool on Friday afternoon, the visiting coach brought a stack of pink and blue cards--yes, pink for girls, blue for boys--and an entry sheet. The person setting up the meet would fill in the 5-part form, putting the fastest--or "A" swimmer--for the home team on the top line, the "B" swimmer below that, and the "C" swimmer last. That process was repeated for the visitor's section of the form--and then repeated for every event. Then you seeded the meet. If the visitors chose the odd lanes, then the "A" home swimmer would be in lane 4, the "B" in 2, and the "C" in 6. (Correspondingly, the visitors would be in lanes 3, 5, 1.) The lane numbers were added to the cards and the cards shuffled so they were in event order by lane.
After the event was swum, the cards went to the scoring table where the scorers would check the times, put them in order from fastest to slowest, and assign place and points. Until 1995, there was a 10 point cap on each event. As you can see from the picture above, the visitors earned 12 points, but were only awarded 10 because of the cap. In addition, the scorers circled the All Star times in red. At the bottom of every page, they added up the points for that page, added that to the total points from the previous page, and moved on. There were two scorers--one from each team--and they checked their totals as they went to be sure they agreed.
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