During the season the club will send swimmers away to various carnivals & meets. For our younger swimmers, the Katherine Carnival in October is great fun & and a chance to improve times and make new friends. The NT Age & Open Championships are held in Darwin in , and our own carnival is held here in late November. In December and January some of our swimmers will travel interstate to compete. This standard of meet requires qualifying times to be met. In April our top swimmers will be hoping to qualify for the National Age Championships and in May every second year we hope to send some of our swimmers to the Arafura Games.  Check with the coaches or on our website for qualifying times for these interstate meets.

Also throughout the season, the club runs two series of small competitions that are held on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings. One of these is a “Pre-Christmas” competition and the other is held over the second half of the season. These competitions are generously sponsored by local businesses and are a “race against the clock”. Swimmers choose up to four of the events on offer each week and try to improve their own times from those previously swum. This is what we call a Personal Best or “PB”.

At the end of each series, each swimmers’ improvements (calculated in seconds) are tallied up, and awards are given to the male & female swimmer in each of the following age groups who has improved the most – 9yrs & under, 10-12yrs, 13yrs & over. After each meet each swimmer is given or emailed a computer printout of their times and PB’s for each event swum.

Warm up for Friday evening meets start at 7.00pm and gates open at 6.45am on Saturday mornings for a 7.30am start. We expect parents will come along and support their children at these meets and provide assistance to the club in running the meet. e.g. help setting up the pool, timekeeping etc.   Don’t worry! No experience is necessary.

A book will be kept on pool deck for swimmers to mark down their entries for these meets. All entries need to be in the book by 6.00pm on the Thursday evening prior to the meet.  Swimmers need to check with their coaches to see what events they should be attempting.

With the opening of the new pool, we hope to hold short course meets during winter and indeed host the Inaugural NT Short Course Championships in August 2011.

Swimmers need to have swum a 50m butterfly time trial at training in under 1minute and 10 seconds, to be able to enter that event at one of our Saturday morning meets, or indeed any SNTI carnival. We would encourage swimmers to perfect their butterfly technique in 25m races first.

There is also now a 30 min time limit for anyone wishing to enter a 1500m freestyle race. Swimmers would have to have had a 1500m swim timed at training first.