2026 Pro Swim Series – Westmont
- Wednesday, March 4 – Saturday, March 7, 2026
- FMC Aquatic Center, Westmont, Illinois
- Long Course Meters (50 meters)
- Meet Central
- Psych Sheet
- Live Results: Also on Meet Mobile: “2026 TYR Pro Swim Series – Westmont”
- Live Stream
- Day 1 Finals Heat Sheet
- Live Recaps
It almost feels redundant to post a whole separate editorial on the topic of night 1’s viewing experience at the Westmont Pro Swim Series.
That’s because, in spite of being a really good session by Pro Swim standards, anybody who wasn’t able to attend the meet wasn’t able to follow the meet in anything resembling real time. That means last night’s live recap conversation was almost entirely around the technical failures.
The live stream didn’t work. It never does when it’s in the USA Swimming app.
The live results didn’t work. The current systems seem to become somehow less reliable by the year.
Even USA Swimming’s data hub didn’t work, which probably only we noticed, but was just the cherry on top of a mess of a night for America’s “professional” swimming series.
At least they got the race videos up quickly on YouTube afterward. See them here.
That means nobody got to see Katie Ledecky vs. Summer McIntosh in the 800 free. Nobody got to see Isabelle Stadden‘s head-turning 200 back. Nobody got to see Chris Guiliano‘s follow-up to his electric 47.3 in prelims of the 100 free.
If you go to the live results page, you still can’t see those times, though Meet Mobile did, eventually, update – though even at its finest, Meet Mobile is a chore.
It is the year of our lord 2026, and we are genuinely still doing this?
I understand why USA Swimming wants its own app. They want the data, they want to be able to sell ads at a high value to their sponsors, they want to ‘own’ the meets and have control over where it’s used.
But it is 2026. This stuff isn’t even complicated anymore. There is a 12 year old somewhere who could use an AI tool like Claude to build a my functional system in an hour. There are tools available that my 75-year-old mother could use to stream the meets reliably.
There are NCAA D3 dual meets with infinitely better presentations than this. Age group meets. Youth hockey.
Go to YouTube. What it costs you in data collection, it more than makes up for in reach. Build your audience, then figure out how to monetize it. While YouTube endemic payouts aren’t spectacular, there are way more ways to monetize thousands of happy customers on YouTube than there are dozens of pissed off customers on your own app.
And all of this ignores the literal thousands of local production companies that could walk in and set this up for a relative discount.
The point is: this isn’t hard. There are a dozen solutions, from a teenager with an iPad and a YouTube Channel all the way up to a full, professional, veteran production. It just takes someone giving enough hoots to get it right.
USA Swimming’s new CEO Kevin Ring seems to get it. He understands that the sport is showing huge cracks. He wants to fix those cracks.
But among the most important and lowest-hanging fruits, the fact that this one hasn’t been picked, baked, and turned into a delicious pie will be perplexing.
So we’re left with a meet in an out-of-the-way place that makes it hard to attend in person, with an out-of-the-way app that makes it hard to stream, that didn’t work, and no results, for a professional swim meet where prize money is being awarded. China for darn sure isn’t going to have these issues when they pay the world’s best swimmers more money to go race there in a few months.
I guess it could be worse. USA Track & Field recently didn’t even attempt to live stream a national championship event (the combined events championship), missed streaming women’s shotput, and they charge $100 per year for access to their streaming platform (albeit with a lot more events).
But if “I guess it could be worse” is your standard, you’re in the wrong line of work.
Thank you! Not every swimmer in these meets gets SwimSwam press or highlight reels, so the only way we can follow our athletes is via these tools. It makes zero sense to me that the meets aren’t streamed on YouTube live. Literally anyone can access that via the app, the web, their TV, etc., and it’s monotized. Why limit the promotion of your sport? So short sided…
I understand the frustrations and you’re right about practically everything, but “an out of the way place”? A suburb of the third largest city in the US isn’t exactly Nome, Alaska…
I hope Kevin Ring gets to the bottom of this quickly and holds his staff (or third party vendors) accountable. This is another symptom/result of people in positions that they cannot handle or are not skilled enough to handle. The message needs to get clearly made to staff and vendors—we are the flagship NGB in the US. We are moving into the future. If you can’t do your job, you will be held accountable.
This is f@@cking ridiculous.
There has never been starker proof that we need all 4 nights of the Pro Swim Series and US Open to air on Peacock. NBC Sports has a proven track record of delivering professional live swimming broadcasts in the US. Clearly USA Swimming is incompetent and unable to do this themselves.
And if they have their personnel and equipment there to do the evening sessions, they could also easily present prelims, possibly with less production, but a presentation that pleases the real swim fans out there.
Agree, but not everyone can or wants to pay for peacock. Not to mention, it’s not available outside the US. I think it should be available more, but USAS should also stream it on YT or their website for free too
“Swimming: Could Be Worse!” is a pretty good piece of branding. Someone get a trademark going
They. Don’t. Care.
Whether “they” are USA Swimming, NCAA, YMCA, NCSA, ISCA, high school or the local club, they erroneously believe that it is not a big deal. Too much work. Not their responsibility. Costs too much.
But of course, it’s a very big deal. Visibility is achingly needed in swimming.
I respectfully disagree. I think most in the organization care. It’s the coddling or failure to hold people accountable that is the issue.
The fact that we still can’t get original replay videos from the SEC conference will always be agonizing.
Thanks for writing this.
With respect to live results, I refuse to pay for Meet Mobile, and as you point out, the “live” results still aren’t posted here: https://www.swmeets.com/Realtime/ProSeries/2026/Westmont
Can someone in the know reply to this comment explaining Meet Mobile’s stranglehold on meet results?
My kids have been in meets where literally the only way to get results sooner than a month after the meet was Meet Mobile, which seems wrong to me. They wouldn’t be posted to swimcloud.com or the meet website, for example.
I actually might be interested in developing a free solution if someone can help point me in the right direction
I tried to run this down at one… Read more »
Meet Mobile – ah yes, the click-and-spin-nothing-happens app from the Inactive Network. Guaranteed to freeze up, go down, lock up or duplicate on every weekend during championship season.
Meet mobile is about due for an antitrust lawsuit. No viable or allowable competition and stagnation (or regression) in function and performance.
Here’s Gemini’s analysis of the situation: https://gemini.google.com/share/3236ad2a0f00
Unfortunately it’s pretty bleak, and apparently there are already people working on competing with Active Network (owners of HyTek Meet Manager and Meet Mobile), such as SwimTopia (makers of Meet Maestro and SwimTopia mobile).
Poor live* results pages are my pet peeve as a swim fan.
I read the AI summary and it sounds like the main purpose of the HyTek live results page is to push people into a monthly paid subscription to MM. But reading people’s complaints about MM it doesn’t sound much better. A free bad service is one thing but a paid bad service is worse. Frustrating.
* Not actually live
I personally don’t have an issue with the format of the old school HyTek results pages like https://www.swmeets.com/Realtime/ProSeries/2026/Westmont provided (1) I can find the page and (2) it actually updates live.
The layout with column of events in a pane on the left and the results themselves in a pane on the right is just fine, and I definitely prefer the fixed-width HTML text rather than the PDFs from Omega.
But one of the main problems is using a 90s era frameset and the caching issues involved, especially when a results URL is reused for another meet. If people have to find out how to clear the cache in their browser in order to view results, something is wrong.
Looking forward to some live results tonight.
Edit: My frame set tag got censored lol
Did they too jump on the bandwagon of firing nearly all of their software developers to cut costs and pretending AI will do their jobs?