2026 Member Registration & Recon Reminders

Jessica Evans

Club Contacts: This message is only sent to the Head Coach and your club/billing contact for your club. Please be sure to distribute this message to your own staff as required.

This message includes three things: a reminder about renewing your club membership, a reminder about 2026 athlete and nonathlete renewals, and an offer to help recon your roster.

First, thank you to 39 STX clubs that have renewed their club membership for 2026. There are only a few clubs (ASC, HCA, MVSC, STSA, TEX, TEXE, RGV) that still need to renew. Please take care of this to prevent registration problems and to prevent issues with swim meet entries of your athletes.

Second, South Texas Swimming has currently registered 4,800 members, which is about 50% of our yearly average. If you are a bulk renew club for athletes (BEAQ, CAA, CCLR, FISH, HILL, NTRO, PFPF, PLAT, TEX, VTAC, and WAVE) and/or a bulk renew club for nonathletes (CAA, CCLR, FISH, HPAC, NTRO, PLAT, TEX, TXLA, VTAC, and WAVE), please take care of renewals for your members because as a member of a bulk renew club, your members cannot accomplish renewals on their own. If your club is *not* bulk renewing members, it’s time to start reminding your athletes and coaches (and other nonathlete members including administrators and “other” nonathlete members) to renew for 2026.

As a reminder, everyone must be registered for 2026 starting January 1 to continue working for your club and practicing with your club. Even one expired member means that your club will not have insurance. Membership is required! And there are no grace periods!

Start reminding now! If you need any assistance, please let me know.

Third, I have sent out some reminders to clubs that are entering unregistered swimmers into swim meets. I wanted to take a minute to explain why this is important!

  • Reason #1: Your club does not have insurance coverage if you have unregistered athletes participating in practices. The grace period for NEW athletes is 30 days. For RENEWING athletes, it is ZERO days.
  • Reason #2: When you enter your athletes in a meet and the recon indicates that they need to register, you are causing extra work for the meet host. Plus, you entered your athlete in the meet with no USA Swimming ID. If you don’t circle back with the meet host and ask them to enter the athlete’s ID, or if you ask the meet host to enter the athlete’s ID and they don’t do that for you, then your athlete’s times won’t load to SWIMS and won’t show up in your team database.
  • Reason #3: Because last-minute registrations are usually done in haste, we see a higher percentage of mismatches on the athlete’s name, date of birth, and gender. These mismatches require the meet host to contact you again to get the correct information and to update it where it is incorrect. Again, when there are mismatches, your athlete’s times won’t load to SWIMS and won’t show up in your team database.

All of these reasons cause extra work for the meet host, for the times officers, and for you. And, frequently, athletes can’t compete because they aren’t registered in time, or their times don’t upload correctly because of missing and/or mismatched data.

I would like to encourage all clubs to take a minute to send me an electronic SDIF file of athletes currently participating in your program so I can recon your entire roster in SWIMS. This will generate a list of issues so you can fix them and prevent all of the problems caused when using a meet recon to identify (and correct) errors in your roster.

To generate an SDIF file in Team Unify:

  • Go to Org Tools/Members
  • Click the check box to select all members
  • Click the Export button, and then click Export SDIF
  • Send me the .zip file that is created

To generate an SDIF file in other team databases, please consult your help system. The file you send me must be in SDIF format (and not a document such as a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet).

A few minutes of your time, and a few minutes of my time, will save you and everyone else a ton of time, and will also ensure that your club’s insurance is active and your athletes will be registered for swim meets and their meet results will be uploaded automatically.

Thank you!
Jessica Evans
South Texas Swimming
[email protected]