USA Swimming, hoping to get a jump on peoples’ travel plans for January, has posted the full meet information for the 2013 Austin Grand Prix that runs from January 18th-20th at the Lee & Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center on the University of Texas campus.
Full meet information available here.
For this meet, USA Swimming has gone back to their previously-announced “B” qualifying standards, after softening them significantly for the first stop of the Grand Prix in Minneapolis. With entries opened up to swimmers with these B-standards on December 4th, about 6 weeks before the meet, it will be quite an experiment to see who all registers.
As compared to the Minneapolis meet, this meet will have one significant advantage in that it’s located in the heart of Texas. That means that it will have a much denser population of swimmers who have met these qualifying standards. Being a long course meet, and after Short Course Worlds, it’s much more likely that USA Swimming’s pro ranks will show up for this meet.
Working against them is the fact that this meet is still in the middle of the college season, which is where most of the swimmers with these qualifying times reside, so it could still be a challenge to fill-out the full entry limits.
Neither the Texas men nor the Texas women have meets scheduled for that weekend.
I don’t get it either.
I have a very difficult time believing that this meet will be well attended for the following reasons: 1) the A cuts are insanely fast (very few swimmers who are not in college have these cuts) 2) the B cuts are fast as well (very few non college teams have more than a few swimmers that can make these cuts in more than 1 or 2 events 3) The meet is LC in the middle of a scy season-for almost all college and club teams this makes little sense.