[Lifesaving] BULSCA Student Nationals 2014
After playing in a concert on Saturday evening I had to drive straight to Bath ready for the BULSCA Student Nationals. I had to be at the venue by 8:30 am Sunday morning, so rather than risking sleeping in and being late I decided to head down the night before. Two closed motorway junctions and attendant diversions later, I eventually made it to the Travelodge where I was spending the night.
I've always enjoyed the BULSCA Championships as an event. More so since they switched to a 50m pool. Last year was my first taste of the competition as a non-competitor, as I organised the whole thing; this year I was going to be judging.
I was assigned to the wet SERC, which this year was again using the whole of the pool owing to the unfortunate absence of the RNLI. The scenario was the end of water polo team training, with the competitors arrive just in time for the start of their training session and being confronted with an incident in the pool. They would enter in through the changing rooms in the middle of one of the pool's long edges. Right in front of them were two water polo players having a fight, with one being knocked unconscious after 30s. On their far left was an unconscious casualty on the side, who'd slipped over and dropped his baby into the pool. In the water at that end were a non-panicking swimmer and a panicking swimmer. On the far side of the pool was the lifeguard with a torpedo buoy, first aid kit, and suspected spinal injury. In the water at the far right hand side were an epileptic, a swimmer with cramp, and a pair of non-panicking swimmers.
Ready for another team to start the SERC. (Credit: Adam Martin)
After a bit of discussion among the judges, and some shuffling around to account for hangovers, experience, and moving judges between SERCs, I somehow ended up with overall judge. Yay me. Not my first go at it, but slightly daunting given the large pool. In the end it wasn't too bad, although having to run around the end of the pool when captains swam across (which many of them did; I'll be writing a post about that at some point) was a little annoying. A couple of the team captains even had me running up and down the side of the pool trying to keep up with. Perhaps the most interesting part though was dealing with the international teams - this year the team from Brno were back again, and we had two teams from Norway as well. Now I don't speak either Czech or Norwegian, but I could tell a great deal just from the body language, tone of voice, an gestures of those teams.
With 32 teams the details become hazy, but in general I didn't notice anything that was particularly horrendous. Communication was a problem for a lot of teams, with the size of the pool compounded by the echoey nature of the space. Several teams didn't really help themselves in that respect by going off in all directions without any sign of a plan for dealing with the SERC, which is really important in a 50m pool with casualties spaced out everywhere. The epileptic was generally dealt with poorly, and I saw many dodgy liftouts of the unconscious in the water. No one even noticed the baby in the pool :-( Several teams were fixated on the lack of aids, and didn't really get anyone out of the pool. Generally though it was ok, although I penalised one team captain for being rude and condescending towards a couple of the casualties.
The difficulty with the SERC was timing. It was a three minute incident, and owing to a lack of time we were on a very short reset. Fortunately there wasn't much to reset, but getting the teams out of the way with their kit, making sure the casualties were in the right places, and making sure we'd marked the previous team was tricky to do in a couple of minutes. We managed to get it down to five minutes total time between one team starting and the next team starting, which I think is quite impressive really.
One of the teams midway through the SERC, with me looming behind the captain to keep an eye on things. (Credit: Adam Martin)
However it just wasn't fast enough. We had the pool booked until 15:30, and when that rolled around we were only half way through the swim-tow event. Sadly there were two swimming clubs in after us, so unlike last year we weren't able to extend our pool time and ended up having to scrap the results of the two swim-tow heats that we'd managed to run. Three aspects make this particularly annoying. First, the aforementioned similar situation last year. I fully acknowledge that I was very lucky on that occasion, what with there being little activity in after us and the pool being very accommodating. But it makes it galling this year when a similar situation was prevented. The second is that from lunchtime up until 15:15 we thought that we could repeat our extension from last year, as the pool had told the Champs Coordinator that we could have four lanes. Until they turned around and said that we couldn't; apparently the second swim club are in every week, but their booking just wasn't in the system for some reason and no one checked. The third annoying aspect is that we should have had time to get everything in - I reckon we needed another 30-45 minutes. Which is less than the amount that we were delayed by at the start of the day by taking forever to get from the dry SERC to the wet SERC, thanks to a marshall who didn't do their job properly. It's so frustrating to know that we could have done it, and that the circumstances were entirely preventable.
That being said, I rather enjoyed the experience, and somehow it felt very different to judging at a standard league competition. (Part of me is glad I missed the tedium of the Speeds though!) This years Champs Coordinator did a great job organising the event, and should be applauded for it. The sad end to Sunday's events shouldn't be blamed on them - they did everything that they could. Unfortunately though I have a horrible feeling that this might have been the last time Champs runs in its current format. Attendance was significantly down this year, which means that the event is making a significant loss. Unless numbers pick up across the board next year, it may well not be financially viable to host the two day event as it is. Whether numbers will increase is another question, and one about which I am not particularly hopeful...
All the judges from the BULSCA Student Nationals. What a happy bunch. (Credit: Adam Martin)
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