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Meet central has potential however there are too many issues to recommend this to others. The system is marketed to eliminate volunteers however it takes the same number, requires tech savvy volunteers to run a meet smoothly, and volunteers to print and process ribbons. It seems difficult to use with a league that has different configuration of pools with regard to the number of lanes and the length of the pools (meter vs yard pool). To run adequately you will need a dedicated iPad to run the meet, an iPhone or iPad for both the starter and stroke judge, and timers who have iPhones. All devices must not have charging issues (an Apple ongoing complaint). Sprint carrier iPhones are inferior and will not work with the system. The starter's cord did not work for us. To maximize the system both teams must be subscribers. Customer service is inconsistent to say the least if not insubordinate to the "customer ". They need field customer service agents to support their subscribed team's first couple of meets to assure a smoothly run meet.

We have now suffered through 2 meets using this app and I cannot stress how bad they have gone. Timers continue to struggle and the meet starts and stops for them to reconnect. There is no flow and kids end up sitting in the sun burning. I have never seen so many swims have to be redone because the times never started, stopped or they can’t save it. The starter then reboots and we sit around for 15-30 minutes while they test and talk. The issues with timing and the app led to an extra few hours for the first meet and today after 5 hours we had just made 50% through it. This was a small meet that rarely had 2 heat. People started to just leave and the starters we trying to find enough stop watches to just stop using this app. I hope the teams agree to stop using this app and use anything else. Stop watches and paper would be a HUGE improvement which defeats the purpose of this app.

I was the starter at a swim meet using Meet Central tonight and it was, to be kind, a boondoggle. The system has too many failure points to be a viable product. We stopped using the system after multiple fails (meaning starter getting knocked off of the system; watches/iPhones not starting; timers phones dropping off of the system. We switched to manual watches and completed our meet, but you can imagine the results are a mess because Meet Central does not integrate with Meet Manager. To the developers: it is completely unreasonable to expect timers to not switch out of the app at some point in the meet. You are not going to change the way people use their phones. You need to develop an app that fits into the current iPhone ecosystem. Developers: Why does everybody use the same Huddle number? What happens if multiple people try to join as “starters?” Developers: The starter and the meet ref should be able to see how many timers and stroke and turn judges are connected to the system. Developers: Why does it take so long for you to get 16 timers logged into the system? Me thinks Meet Central developers have never worked on transaction processing systems that need to be highly reliable and fault tolerant. If you are a swim team, my advice is that this system is way too unreliable to use at this point.