2019 Winter Jr. Nationals East
- December 11th-14th, 2019
- McAuley Aquatic Center (GA Tech), Atlanta, GA
2019 Winter Jr. Nationals West
- December 11th-14th, 2019
- Weyerhaeuser Aquatic Center, Federal Way, WA
The dates and locations for the U.S. Winter Jr. Nationals East and West meets have been decided by USA Swimming, with the East meet taking place December 11-14th at Georgia Tech, and the West meet taking place the same dates in Federal Way, Washington.
The East meet will be taking place just 4 days after the Winter Nationals meet concludes at Georgia Tech’s McAuley Aquatic Center. McAuley Aquatic Center‘s state-of-the-art facility is a regular host for prime-time national and international meets, and it was originally built for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.
The West meet, held at the Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatics Center in Federal Way, WA, will be taking place at the same time. Weyerhaeuser is also a state-of-the-art facility, which is a regular host of Speedo Sectionals and LSC Championship meets, and has hosted the US Diving Olympic Trials, NCAA Championships, Pac-12 Championships, Winter Nationals, and Jr. Nationals.
It hasn’t been announced whether the Jr. Nationals meets will be contested in Short Course Yards or Long Course Meters. Since the meets will be taking place during the 2020 Olympic Trials qualifying period, it’s possible the Jr. Nats will be swum LCM, or at least finals may be swum LCM. However, it’s also possible the Junior meets will be contested entirely in SCY, and Winter Nationals will be contested in LCM.
USA Swimming has announced that their target for the 2020 OT is 1200-1400 swimmers, a significant decrease from the 1700+ that competed in both 2012 and 2016. That means we can expect faster Olympic Trials cuts for 2020.
Pretty sure that in the Steering meeting and other meetings at the recent USA-Swimming Conventions that the plan was for both JNATS will be 25 SCY meets with a Sunday time trials session held 50 LCM.
Based on the current geographic mapping from USA Swimming…2/3 of the country swims “west” while 1/3 swims “east”. What is the logic? As a family in the midwest, why travel to the far corner of the country when the east-location is closer by 600 miles. For the folks in the southwest i.e. Texas, they are closer to Atlanta than Federal Way by over 1K miles. Is this a way to weed out athletes from competing?
At the same time, when Juniors is at Texas, It is very far away for people who live in Washington
We live in a very big country. The groupings are based on population, rather than land area. There are a couple of options to solve this, and I don’t think either is particularly good:
1) Make more meets (this game could go on forever, until you wind up with meets that look like futures or sectionals)
2) Make the meets super-lopsided, with one region obviously stronger than the other because they were cut by land area, rather than population.
Unfortunately, the best pools in our country are, for the most part, near its edges. Texas, California, Washington, Florida. There’s a few exceptions (Iowa), for example, but to make a divided meet like this work, the need for great pools… Read more »
…or another option which few would like: just like Summer Jnrs, make the cuts harder to whittle down the numbers and only have only 1 Winter Jnrs meet. <– I'm not in favor of that BTW…Just Sayin'!