Swimming, often called a "black and white sport", has an impartial scoring mechanism based on precise timings to the hundredth of a second. Swim meets don't determine winners based on judgement ... and there are no points for style. The swimmer who touches the wall first, wins ... period ... the end ... black and white.
But what if a twelve year old barley out touches an eleven year old in a race? The twelve year old wins the race, but the eleven year old likely had the better performance given his/her younger age. Enter the Hy-Tek company, with their concept of Power Points (tm).
Hy-Tek developed an algorithm that attempts to quantify the "quality" of a swim. The algorithm calculates a normalized point value between 1 and 1100, given a swimmer's gender, age and swim time for a specific event. The higher the power points ... the better the swim.
In theory, power points can be compared across gender, age and event boundaries. 200 power points equals 200 power points, regardless of who swam what event. That means a ten year old girl swimming the 50 backstroke could race a thirteen year old boy swimming the 400 IM, and use power points to determine the winner ... in theory. In reality, it seems the more dissimilar the swims, the less accurate the comparison would be ... but maybe that's just my skepticism.
Try out USA Swimming's Power Point calculator for yourself. Warning: A swimmer's power points will be one (1) until the swimmer starts approaching the 'B' time standard for their age.
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