Gabby+Maddalena

May 2, 2010
Somebody finally responded to my post about "bad" recruiting classes and gave me a semi-acceptable answer- although he/she was wrong on some of the rankings:

April 27, 2010
Below is a really cool new aspect of Collegeswimming.com. It is an area of the site created just for recruits and college coaches. I really wish that I had something like this back in 2005 when I was being recruited, so it's really cool to see that there is a space where recruits can create profiles and update their times where college coaches can see them all. Based upon this, I am curious to see if any recruiting rules will change based upon this- since contact with recruits is limited, yet there aren't very many rules about technological contact.



There has been a lot of talk about the changing of conferences over the next couple of years... While it may not affect some sports, it is definitely going to affect College Swimming, basically because (especially with title nine) there are some conferences that lack either men's or women's swimming. For instance, one person wrote about how they thought Texas or Texas A&M would be leaving the big 12. If this happened, there would only be Missouri men's swimming left in the Big 12 conference- which defeats the purpose of having the sport in the first place.



I also read a thread about the best recruiting classes (that had already signed) for 2010. This sparked my interest because Wisconsin's women's team is always top 20 (sometimes top 10) at NCAA's, yet we didn't get a whole lot of recruits that signed this year. Hence, I asked a question that was sort of pessimistic, but relevant to the topic as well:



April 25, 2010
Below is an example of a type of post that isn't as common as the gossip or results posts. The user "SweetBlood" created an account to ask a question about his tattoo and swimming. I thought it was rude of the first person who replied and was like "Why not just wait until after the meet when you can afford to take some time off?". I was like geesh, if the kid wants to get a tattoo, let him. Then again, I didn't respond because I figured a) I have no knowledge on tattoos and b) it wasn't worth getting into an online "fight" over this...

April 22, 2010
I always run across these spam postings on Collegeswimming.com but never thought that I should post one until now. Normally, the administrator gets them off pretty quickly, but this one has been up for over a day... I think it is amusing that people actually respond to them and angrily tell them to take it down.

April 13, 2010
Results to my "What Kind of Tech User Are You?" quiz... I would say it is about right, considering I grew up with the Internet, yet I am not super big into using it for anything except social aspects of life and/or school.




 * April 11, 2010

This is a continuation of the thread about the dateline interviews. Everyone basically seems really upset about how the sport was portrayed- which to me seems the opposite of what they should be- which is concerned, based upon the fact that USA swimming has reported such a high number of inappropriate swimmer-coach relationships in the past 10 years. People seem to be forgetting that it is not the head of the sport that is making swimming look bad, but the coaches who are engaging in sexual activities with underaged swimmers- not to mention that the high number of coaches suspended for these actions are probably minute to those that don't report it. Later on in this thread, one of the Collegeswimming.com users brought up a good point that maybe USA swimming should have a list of these coaches online so that they are not re-hired by another unknowing team and repeat the same offenses.

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 * April 10, 2010

This post really interested me because it was a link to the 20/20 news story about sexual interactions between women involved in USA Swimming and their coaches. My sister and a bunch of my friends had texted me about the tv interviews, but I didn't have time to watch them until now. This thread was the beginning of a super long bunch of posts, all of them seemingly angry about the smug attitude and awkward interview that the head of USA Swimming had given.

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 * April 6, 2010**

Today I was reading a thread about a prominent coach of a US club team who retired. This thread struck itself to be a little odd to me, because immediately, people started responding in a gossipy manner- rather than talking about his accomplishments or contributions to the sport, they just assumed something scandalous had occured.




 * April 5, 2010**

I finally decided to join SwimUtopia to see what it was all about... It is still relatively new so there was not much to see, but I will be checking it out more hopefully




 * March 25, 2010**

To me, this post stood out because I have found it so rare that people take the time to actually write thoughtful, full, punctuated sentences, especially on these message boards. It was also kind of cool to see that one of the online community's members was stating his opinons on the NCAA health/neuro virus fiasco. He was basically reminding people not to play Monday morning quarterback about the situation- which is not a popular idea, but wrote it so articulately that it forced people not only to pay attention, but to respond positively to the idea as well.



March 24, 2010
I found this post to be pretty interesting, because it promoted another site that is a competitor to that of collegeswimming.com- because it has a broader aspect of the online swimming community since it covers world, US, college, and age group swimmng. I also thought it was kind of funny that the first comment was another user's rude remarks about the aesthetic of the site, as well as the original poster's short, dry comment back. Online bickering over absoutely nothing at it's finest.



March 16, 2010
I realized that I hadn't been updating as much as I should have, and I think the main reason is because there havent been any dual or any conference meets in between the conferences and NCAAs so the posts have been pretty slow. However, Women's NCAAs is this week and Men's NCAA's is next week- so that should give me plenty to talk about in the next couple of week!

One of my most recent posts was on a thread about Men's NCAA's and predictions. People kept bringing up the health of a guy from Texas, Dave Walters. I am originally from Texas and haven't heard much about him/that anything was wrong so I was hoping somebody could fill me in. Below is what I posted: Later that evening, I got a reply (kind of) to my question I had asked about Dave Walters. Someone wrote back and said that his "health issue" was the black lung (cough cough). Then, the next person ignored it. Maybe soon my question will be addressed. I'm surprised, because by reading the other posts, I've noticed that people LOVE to dish on current or former swimmers' personal business. I've even done it myself in prior posts.

Another thread I commented on was the Women's NCAA predictions page. This page had more posts than the men's one because Women's NCAA's starts tomorrow. Last year one of the coolest parts of the meet was when 3 swimmers from Florida placed first, second, third in a backstroke event. I posted asking if anyone thought it would happen again: Later that evening, I got a reply from someone who's name was UFswimFan (about my post about the Florida girls), which I thought was funny because they obviously must have taken it personally.

March 1, 2010
Today I was looking at a thread about Men's Big Ten Championships, which had just finished. People were ragging on Wisconsin and how bad they did, minus the exception of one of my teammates, Dan Lester. They were specifically picking on a teammate of mine, Chuck Allison. I found myself semi offended and felt I needed to offer up an explanation to two of the people's questions (which were why Chuck Allison swam poorly and where Dan Lester had come from, since he didn't join our team until December). Here is what I wrote:

February 19, 2010
Someone finally answered as to what was happening about the relay starts and it was actually pretty informative, considering I've been swimming almost a decade and I had no idea the rule existed. According to "LocalSuperHero", who is a SILVER MEMBER and has almost 300 posts (probably a reliable source on this site), anything over -.10 on a reaction timed by a touch pad isn't a false start unless ruled so by the judges. Apparently, benefit of the doubt is given to the swimmer and it is considered a "touch pad malfunction", seeing as an official would notice if someone jumped by more than a tenth of a second.

It was apparent during these posts that some sort of intermediate knowledge of swimming is required in this thread, I doubt many people who don't follow swimming would be able to follow, with phrases such as "pad", "jumped", DQ and such...

February 18, 2010
Alot more people are talking about the issue of touch pads on the blocks and relay starts. I was looking at results from another Conference's championship meet (SEC's) and noticed that they, too, had weird relay reaction times (normally if something registers as anything negative (-) on reaction time, a Disqualification (DQ) takes place... but on Florida's A Relay, someone registered with a -.13 relay start, yet the relay wasn't DQed. So I asked for help as to why: Another thread that I commented on was a thread asking for help on how to make championship meets more fun. Being as to how I have been swimming since I was 12, I figured I could offer a pretty cool idea:

February 17, 2010
During the meet today there was a malfunction with the pad and I noticed that people were talking about it...



February 16, 2010
Yesterday I checked my post on Collegeswimming.com about the World Youth Olympics and was disappointed to see that someone under the name 'Ben' had basically shut down my post. I was unaware that the US wasn't sending anyone to the games, so I guess it is informational that I found that out, but I'm still disappointed he ended my conversation (haha).

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After that sort of a let down, I moved on to my Big Ten Championship discussion I had started... and I found that quite a few people had commented on it, which is not surprising, considering Big Tens starts tomorrow (I am currently in a hotel room in Purdue, waiting to compete Wednesday through Saturday). Here is what I found below... followed by even more posts...

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I think I am going to wait until tomorrow after the meet starts (in the evening) to make any comments and/or predictions. I am looking forward to being at the meet while contributing to this message board, because often times people will comment about something that they "hear" that may not have any truth to it at all... maybe I can set some people in their place :) OR maybe not. We'll see!!

February 14, 2010
I was having a little bit of trouble getting stuff to post on the Collegeswimming.com message boards, etc... so I emailed the board advisor, who took quite a while to get back to me, but he finally did and I was able to make a couple posts. The first post I did was in response to somebody's elses topic/thread that had already been started. I found the subject Big 10 Swimming underneath the "Division I" subcategory. Since the Big 10 Championship for women starts on Tuesday, I provided the following post:



Seeing as I had commented on an already started thread, I decided to start my own and see how that went, as well... Earlier this week I had been talking to my swim coach from at home back in Texas. He called me to tell me that he was in St. Louis for a USA Swimming Grand Prix meet. He had brought a 16 year old kid from my team in order to try and make the US Youth Olympics. I had never heard of this "Youth Olympics", and he told me it was a new thing. I tried to find a little info on the games but basically only found a homepage, so I posted a topic under the category, General Discussion, asking if anybody else knew anything about it...

This is a screenshot of what I wrote:



Followed be an almost IMMEDIATE response from another member, who took a dig at crazy "swim parents"... I predict this discussion could be a pretty humorous one...



February 8, 2010
For my practicum project, I am examining special interest communities. I chose to look at the sport of swimming in different online communities. I registered a username (UWCA346GM- creative, I know) under CollegeSwimming.com, USAswimming.org and Swimnetwork.com.

The first site I joined was CollegeSwimming.com. This site has articles, links to different websites, rankings, recruiting updates, and my favorite aspect- which is the message board. Being a collegiate swimmer, myself, I found it was really interesting to read what other people have to say about different athletes, schools, and meets that have taken place. Below is a screenshot of my registration with Collegeswiming.com.




 * I then decided to register with USAswimming.org. This site is a little less about Collegiate swimming, and more about what us in the "swimming world" call USS (which is basically, United States Swimming- a year-round foundation that isn't part of the NCAA and regulates every other aspect of the sport. It is also a partner with FINA (the world swimming organization) and the USOC (the US olympic committee)).**




 * The final website (as of now) that I decided to join is a crossover between USA Swimming and College Swimming. It is a combination of the two, and actually has a ton of really cool aspects to it. There are blogs, videos that users are allowed to upload, and a bunch of cool articles. Below is a screenshot of my registration with Swim Network.**