In today’s iPhone age, apps have simplified many tasks in our lives: counting calories, grocery shopping, reading the news. Now, it looks like an app can also vastly streamline summer swimming meets, which are often plagued with delays and can last several hours. Meet Central, an app spearheaded by Olympic Gold-Medalist Charlie Houchin, may do away with this mess completely.
Houchin, whose parents swam for N.C. State, is the CEO of HydroXphere, a Cary-based company that owns the Meet Central app. According to Houchin, Meet Central will allow summer swim clubs too run swim meets entirely through mobile phones and iPads.
“The benefits for the summer clubs are that we run the swim meet in less time, with fewer volunteers and with less maintenance,” Houchin said.
Currently, summer swim meets are run manually, which often leads to imprecise timing and delays in calculating scores. Times have to be run —literally— to a scorekeeper, who then must compare times by hand before determining a winner. Coaches and volunteers often take heat from anxious parents who complain about how long this can take.
With the app, however, timers and judges are connected through mobile devices. Only one person needs to start the clocks, which are all synchronized through the app. Each timer can stop his or her own clock as swimmers reach the wall. Timers only need to click “save” at the end of the meet and scores are calculated automatically. According to Lauren Clark, social media manager at HydroXphere, this could save up to an hour in swim meets.
“Currently, there’s no app-based function for timing swim meets,” Clark said. “That’s why we’re revolutionary.”
Michelle Dettloff of Chapel Hill, who swam in summer swim meets for 14 years and coached for five years, said she thinks it’s finally time for the swimming community to join the digital world.
“We have been writing on paper for so long, and we didn’t think with everything being digital these days, ‘How is there not a system that makes this simpler?’” Dettloff said.
Houchin, a 2010 graduate of the University of Michigan, said he came up with this idea while he was still an undergraduate. After a few refinements of the business plan, he found Mike Curran, currently the president of HydroXphere, and together they launched the company.
Still, that doesn’t mean Houchin has retired from swimming, and he continues to train with other Olympians.
“Trying to pursue the highest possible level is fun,” Houchin said. “I’ve got a great swim coach [N.C. State alumnus John Payne], and a great partner in the business, so I have people helping me through the process.”
Houchin’s involvement is one of the main selling points of Meet Central according to Clark, who studied for her Ph.D. in Communication Rhetoric and Digital Media at N.C. State.
“At this point, we’re really trying to make the connection between Meet Central and Charlie Houchin really strong,” Clark said. “When we use Meet Central social media to allow him to communicate with young swimmers through the Meet Central profiles, it generates a lot of buzz.”
The company has generated quite a bit of buzz already. Even though Dettloff has never used Meet Central personally, she said she thinks HydroXphere is set up to be the future of summer swim meets.
“Now, when you go to swim meets, you don’t have to worry about all the hassle and mess you shouldn’t have to think about,” Dettloff said. “You can actually focus on why people join swimming: to have fun, get some exercise, learn the sport, and to be around friends. People sometimes forget about these things because at the end of the day, the only thing they take away from swimming is how much of a hassle it was.”
Currently, HydroXphere offers both a paid and unpaid version of the app. Anyone can download the app for free to run a swim meet. However, a paid subscription is required to save meet times or to broadcast those times to other users through a social-media-like “Xphere.” In the Xphere, swimmers can log and compare times.
