Swim England Competitive Swimming Hub
Licensed Meets levels, calendar and resources
May 17, 2016 CompeteLicensed Meets are swimming events licensed by Swim England. This means they have to meet certain standards to ensure fair competition.
The English swimming licensed meets calendar contains a range of ‘open’ meets, designed to give all competitive swimmers in England the chance to achieve their true potential.
- Visit the full Meets calendar (external site)
Guide to the four levels of licensed meets
All licensed meets are subject to Swim England Regulations and the Swim England Technical Rules of Racing. They are graded into four levels.
- Level 1 Meets are long course (50m) only and cover National, Regional and County Championships. Their purpose is to enable athletes to achieve qualifying times for entry into National, Regional and County Championships.
- Level 2 Meets are short course (25m) only and cover National, Regional and County Championships. Their purpose is to enable athletes to achieve qualifying times for entry into National, Regional and County Championships in short course.
- Level 3 Meets are long and short course events. Their purpose is to enable athletes to achieve times for entry into Regional and County Championships and other Meets at Level 1 or Level 2.
- Level 4 Meets are entry level events in pools 25m or greater. Borough Championships are an example. They are for inexperienced athletes and swimmers seeking to compete outside their club environment. If times are good athletes progress to Level 3 Meets.
Upgraded process for uploading Licensed Meets results to Rankings (October 23)
If you are organising a new Licensed Meets, Swim England has introduced a new automated process to upload your results without having to email the results to our Rankings team.
Currently meet promoters send their meet results to Swim England, in order for these results to be manually added to https://www.swimmingresults.org/showmeetsbyevent/ and on each individual members’ profile. This is a process that can potentially take days.
Swim England has created an automated process that speeds this up and gives control to the promoters to upload results via https://resultsuploader.swimming.org/. If the uploaded results have no errors, they will automatically be uploaded to rankings within one to two hours.
Please use the new licensed meet application form for your next meet. We also have a step-by-step guide to assist when uploading your first set of results.
Any meet that has already been licensed will continue to use the previous process by sending results to the Rankings team.
If you have any questions, please contact rankings@swimming.org.
Frequently Asked Questions
Currently meet promoters send their meet results to Swim England, in order for these results to be manually added to https://www.swimmingresults.org/showmeetsbyevent/ and on each individual members’ profile. This is a process that can potentially take days.
Swim England has created an automated process that speeds this up and gives control to the promoters to upload results via https://resultsuploader.swimming.org/. If the uploaded results have no errors, they will automatically be uploaded to rankings within one to two hours.
The new application form contains additional information to comply with the minimum depths guidance set by World Aquatics. We also require additional information to ensure the correct information is collected for the meet.
If you submit an application using the previous form, your regional licensing officer (RLO) will ask you to submit your next meet using the new 2023 licensing meet application form.
Once your application has been submitted to the RLO, they will check all of the information on the form and also check any clashes for meets in the Region. Once they have approved the form, they will send it on to the Swim England licensed meets team to be licensed on the system. This generates a license number and also adds the meet to the national licensed meet calendar. The license number is then emailed to the RLO and the meet promoter for the meet.
This is a confirmation email to confirm that your application has been processed and is now using the new automated process. The email will contain information required to upload results such as your unique licensed meet key and licence number. Save this email until you are ready to upload the on the results uploader website.
1. Licensed meet key
2. Licence number
3. PDF results file provided by Hytek and SPORTSYSTEMS
4. Results files provided by:
b. SPORTSYSTEMS – LENEX format – LEF files
Please download our step-by-step guide.
Refer to the question ‘I’ve received an email saying ‘Your application has been approved’, What do I need to do?’ regarding your unique licensed meet key and licence number.
Even if you are not using either management systems, you can still provide results in either HDR and MDF format, or LENEX files.
View your results via Swimming Results.
Swimmers with accepted results will show on Swimming Results. The team will contact you via email about the failed swimmers if they cannot be matched against a membership number. Please allow up to 72 hours for the team to get in touch before contacting us.
This could be as simple as a mistyped date of birth or a small error in the name, which causes the swimmer to not be matched automatically. The team can manually match this but will require the membership number.
A member of the team will be in touch via email within three working days to resolve the issues.
This could be an issue with the exported files and we may need you to export the files again.
Before uploading your results, we recommend validating your results with our online tools, LENEX Results Check and MRF Results Data Validation. This will help identify any issues with your results.
Further information on Licensed Meets
If you are organising Licensed Meets, or are interested to know more about them, below is our Licensed Meets document library.
It contains a range of Word and PDF documents for swimmers and organisers alike. Everything from criteria for entry into events to a list of Regional Licensing Officers to contact is there. Any new help or guidance created for Licensed Meets will be added to the library.
If there is something you feel is missing or incorrect please contact us.
