When you look at a team or swimmer's improvement summary, you'll see a few numbers together — for example, Athens Bulldog Swim Club shows 180 Entries, 77 Personal Bests (43%), and 31 Season Bests (17%). Here's what each of those means and how they relate.
Splashes vs. Entries
Every time a swimmer dives in and swims a race, that's a splash. Over the course of a meet, a team's swimmers might log well over a hundred splashes once you count prelims, finals, relay leadoffs, and time trials.
But not every splash represents a new opportunity to improve. If a swimmer swims the same event twice — say, the 200 Free in prelims and then again in finals — that's two splashes, but only one real opportunity to post a best time in that event. We call this one opportunity an Entry.
So:
- Splashes = every individual swim, no matter how many times an event was repeated
- Entries = the deduplicated count of "swimmer + event" opportunities at the meet
This is why Athens Bulldog Swim Club shows 180 Entries even though their swimmers actually hit the water 258 times. Those extra 78 splashes were repeat swims of events already represented in the 180.
Personal Bests and Season Bests
For each Entry, we look at the swimmer's best swim of that event at the meet (regardless of round) and compare it to their best time coming into the meet:
- If it beats their all-time best, it's a Personal Best (PB)
- If it beats their best time so far this season but not their all-time best, it's a Season Best (SB)
Only one outcome is recorded per Entry — a swimmer doesn't get counted twice for the same event, even if more than one of their swims that day happened to beat an old best.
Why the percentages are calculated the way they are
The 43% and 17% you see are Personal Bests ÷ Entries and Season Bests ÷ Entries — not divided by splashes. This matters because dividing by splashes would understate how well a team actually performed. A swimmer who swam an event twice and only improved once didn't "fail" half the time — they had one real opportunity, and they took it.
Why we count it this way
- It reflects real opportunities, not raw activity. A team with a lot of prelims/finals swims naturally logs more splashes, but that shouldn't inflate or deflate their improvement rate relative to a team that swims fewer rounds.
- It avoids double-counting. If we compared every splash independently, a single strong event could count as multiple "wins" (or a single soft prelims swim could count as an extra "miss") for what is really just one event.
- It's fair across different meet formats. Some meets have prelims/finals for every event; others are timed finals only. Counting by Entry keeps improvement rates comparable across those formats.