Two weeks ago we wrote about race mode before it had been near a real gala, so that we couldn't pretend afterwards. This is the afterwards.
The first thing it did on the night was call a swimmer's personal best into question. The hand time came in more than 3% under the official PB, the tile went amber and said Check, exactly as built. The swim was later confirmed as a genuine PB. So the card's one safety rule fired on a real result and was wrong.
We're fine with that. The rule exists because a flattering hand time on a card a 14-year-old can see does more harm than a cautious one. It said "check this", not "this didn't happen", and checking took a glance at the official results. A tool that never doubts its own number is the one we'd worry about.
Arena League, round one, 10 October. 51 events. We captured 49 of them, 17 of those relays, on one tablet, with one coach tapping and another running the team. That was the question we couldn't answer in advance, and it has an answer. It works, if the tapping coach does nothing else. The moment you try to also sort out who's swimming the medley relay, you miss a wall.
The 50 free was fine, which surprised us. Three cycles between the 15 and the flags is enough. What's hard isn't the speed of the race, it's the gap between races: forty seconds to find the next swimmer on the sheet, confirm the lane and be ready for the start signal. We'd set the next race up wrong twice before we learned to do it during the previous swim's last length rather than after the touch.
The export went out at quarter past nine that night: ten pages, initials only, to the coaches. Everyone who was there had the numbers before they'd got home. That used to take us until Tuesday, if it happened at all.
We said we'd include whatever broke. Three things did.
The worst one we didn't find until the next morning. On two relay events the legs were recorded against the wrong swimmers. The tablet held one order, the league's official sheet held another, and the official sheet was right: the order had been changed on poolside and the tablet hadn't been told. Nobody's time was wrong, but the names on them were, and a stroke rate attributed to the wrong child is worse than no stroke rate. We corrected it from the official sheet on Sunday. The fix in the app is obvious in hindsight: a relay order can change up to the whistle, so the screen has to make it one tap to swap two legs, and the export should say when a team's order was edited after the race.
One stroke-rate reading was lost entirely. The coach dismissed the tap prompt by accident and there is no way to enter a rate after the race. We wrote it on the card as a note instead, which is what we'd have done before we built any of this. There should be a way back in.
And one relay wasn't captured at all. Event 44 came and went while the tablet was being handed between coaches. Fifty events out of fifty-one isn't bad for a first night. It's still one family who'll ask where theirs is.
The boring parts held, which is what we most wanted. The pool had the usual dead patch of signal at the balcony end and the tablet never noticed: every tap saved on the device and caught up when it could. The screen stayed awake through the 200s. Initials only on the screen meant we could hold it at waist height in front of a gallery of parents without thinking about it.
The two talking-point rules did what we built them to do, which is mostly stay quiet. A card that says nothing about turns is a card where the turns were consistent, and most were. Where it did speak, it was the underwater fading over a race, and in each case the coach who'd watched the swim nodded. That's the test. If the card tells a coach something they didn't already half-know, it's probably wrong. If it confirms the thing they suspected and puts a number on it, they'll use it on Monday.
No wall splits for individual races. We knew that going in and it's still the gap a coach notices first.
Somewhere in the second half a coach from one of the other clubs came and stood next to us for a race and asked what we were doing. We showed them the card for the swim they'd just watched. They asked the question every coach asks, which is whether a coach can capture and run a team at the same time, and we gave them the honest answer from above. They've asked not to be named, which is fair, and we've not put them in the sales sheet either. But it's the first time anyone outside our own club has looked at it over a real race, and they didn't walk off.
Before round two: swapping two relay legs becomes one tap, and the export says when an order was changed after the race. A stroke rate can be entered after the event, marked as late. And the importer keeps the age band from the team sheet, which it dropped this time and which the comparison tiles need.
What we won't change is the amber tile. It was wrong once on the night and it was right to be.