JULY 2024 (www.aaaa-sa.org) Lane Lines

Inquiries are being received regarding the status and future, if any,  of the original Alamo Area Aquatics Association (AAAA) Website; address noted in red just above. The Site now bears the title of “das Schwimmen.”

Planning for the original Website was initiated at the behest of the Chairman of the AAAA Board of Directors (BoD) late in 2001. At the time, there did not seem to be the necessary resources within the BoD to launch such an effort, so volunteers from outside the BoD were sought and recruited. After a bit less than one year, the Website was first published to the World Wide Web (www) on 26 September 2002.

All of the necessary domain acquisition, registration and web hosting were properly acquired at zero cost to AAAA. Parenthetically, in the 22 years the Website was operational, AAAA contributed not one cent to the project. The entire effort was always staffed, funded and managed by volunteers. Over the years since 2002, the Website underwent many revisions and improvements as it evolved to serve the clients of AAAA, i.e., athletes, parents and coaches.

In the Fall of 2009, the then AAAA Chairman somewhat unexpectedly retired. The new Chair, along with a number of his colleagues, almost immediately (early 2010) signaled that the Website; ostensibly because it existed well outside influence of the BoD, was to be slowly but surely marginalized to the point of ultimate deletion from the www.

There was a point within the 2014 – 2015 time period when AAAA was offered the opportunity to acquire the aaaa-sa.org/net/com domains in order to bring Website management and control under their organizational umbrella. For reasons unknown, then as now, AAAA declined the offer.

At the time (late 2010 and early 2011), just as now, AAAA had semi-independent satellite locations and in the beginning of the marginalization effort, not all participated in the project. It actually took a bit more than ten years for all of AAAA to actively reject their original zero-cost Website. Now in mid-2024, clients of AAAA do not appear to be well or effectively served by its current Website presence on the www.

Since the late 1970s, what became www.aaaa-sa.org (das Schwimmen) maintained reliable, close, philosophical and operational ties to just one of the semi-independent AAAA satellites. The last of those ties began to fray during late 2021 and early 2002. By late 2023 the relationship was history and the original Website and AAAA were no longer connected or related in any way and the title was changed.

Around Thanksgiving of 2023, discussions were held with the second tier of management at one of the satellite locales regarding the potential for displaying Real Time Results from swim meets, a feature of HY-TEK’s Meet Manager software. Das Schwimmen unilaterally arranged for an FTP Server to be made available to receive that data and post them to the www in close to Real Time. As before, none of this cost AAAA nor the satellite a single cent and the data was thusly posted all through the 2023 – 2024 High School swimming season. That service / capability is, of course, no longer available.

At the present time, it appears that AAAA maintains an Organizational Website at: https://www.alamoareaaquatics.com/page/home. However, some, but not all, of the satellites maintain their own separate Websites. This decentralized arrangement makes it unnecessarily difficult to find certain kinds of data. One satellite has even put some Meet Results behind some sort of code or password.

Results from Sanctioned Club Meets are usually available on the South Texas Swimming Website (www.stswim.org), and are normally published as PDF documents, which can easily and have been tampered with in the past.

The gold standard of pre- and post-meet data is the Meet Manager Swim Backup File from which many different kinds of data sets can be created. Even the meet of interest itself can be recreated if necessary. Recent searches of some of the AAAA Websites did not reveal any current Swim Backup Files, which does not mean they are necessarily absent, but rather are difficult or perhaps impossible to find.

Das Schwimmen has been effectively blocked from accessing pre- or post-meet data from Club meets. It remains to be seen whether the same blockage will be in place for the upcoming High School Season, as High School Meet data exists in a much different environment that does Club data.

Given the circumstances and the somewhat tense environment which has been festering since 2010, it seems quite possible, perhaps even likely, das Schwimmen and its related Website (www.tisdo.org) will be permanently deleted from the World Wide Web sometime before this calendar year comes to an end.