JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

Vera Wilson greets her son Eli, 6, after he finished his heat in the 25-yard freestyle Friday during the first day of the Roanoke Valley Aquatic Association's year-end swim meet at the Salem Family YMCA. Eli swims for Olympic Park Swim Club.

A competitor enters the pool during a freestyle heat during the first day of the City/County swim meet.

Megan Holbrook, 9, did her part.

She dived into the pool at the Salem Family YMCA on Friday morning and swam two lengths of backstroke in one minute, 6.17 seconds, contributing four points to her Olympic Park swim team's total in the process.

Then she went back to her favorite thing, writing, and goofing off with friends, not especially aware of the complex mechanism that allowed her to compete in the contained chaos called the Duane Whitenack City/County Championship Meet.

After decades of practice, the whole operation runs a like a neatly perfected Rube Goldberg machine, only it's swimmers, not balls, running through the elaborate set of mazes and levers.

To be precise, 1,153 swimmers, ages 3 to 68, from the 15 teams entered in the two-day Roanoke Valley Aquatic Association event.

"Whoa!" Megan said when she heard those numbers.

Those swimmers will complete 682 heats by the end of the meet this afternoon, a total of 4,950 swims.

"Whoa!"

And the whole thing is pulled off by an army of 400 volunteers, almost all of them parents of swimmers. They direct traffic, sell food, monitor the halls, organize race heats, time events, judge strokes and tabulate results.

"Without them, you couldn't do anything," Megan said wisely.

It goes like this:

A group of swimmers is called to the staging area and organized into heats. The boys or girls in a particular heat sit in a row, already organized into the lanes in which they'll swim. Each time a heat is completed, everyone moves up a row of chairs, until at last it is their turn to swim.

They swim and touch an electronic timing pad as they finish, which sets electrical circuits to crackling, and their times magically appear both on a scoreboard and on a computer where final results are tabulated.

The swimmers exit the pool, and it starts all over again -- quickly.

Friday morning, the backstroke heats for 7- and 8-year-olds were starting less than a minute apart. There was no time for nerves.

"Step into the water, please," the starter said before the backstroke races. If necessary, he would add, with slight impatience, "Step into the water, ladies."

And about 50 seconds later, "Nice swim, ladies, please clear the pool. ... Please clear the pool."

"It's amazing it runs as smoothly as it does," said Laura Holbrook, whose son Henry, 7, swims along with Megan.

"It is amazing to pull something of this magnitude off and no one is paid," said Lynda White of Botetourt County, whose daughter, Kayla, 13, swims for the Vinton Area Swim Team.

Does Kayla ever think about what it takes to put on this meet?

Silence.

"They just worry about what snacks they have," her mother concluded.

It's an event that's been refined over years of practice, said the meet director, Alan Criss, who for the second year in a row is missing a chance to see his son Austin compete in a Virginia state championship meet while he runs City/County.

The RVAA was founded in 1964 with six pools as members. For years, the big championship meet was held outdoors.

Back then, timing was done with stopwatches and results calculated on paper, said Harold Wallick, whose daughters grew up and left RVAA swimming years ago, but who is still helping put the City/County meet together with his wife, Irene.

The meet eventually moved indoors to the Lancerlot in Vinton until the building collapsed in a blizzard in 1993. Then it was at Radford University's Dedmon Center until last summer.

That's when roof repairs forced the RVAA to look for another venue.

"I said 'sure' before I knew what it meant," said Mark Johnson, branch director for the Salem YMCA.

The relationship is more of a partnership than a simple building rental, he said. The Y closes for two days, but Johnson said it's worth it to expose people to the YMCA and put on a family-oriented event with a mission consistent with the Y's.

Unlike many swimming leagues, the RVAA commonly has parents and their children competing in the same meets for the same team -- something that can't really happen in any other recreational sport, Criss pointed out.

The confined spaces at the Y forced organizers to divide the meet into age 10-and-under events in the morning and 11-and-over in the afternoon to minimize crowding.

That helped, but there were still some issues last year. So many people crowded into the gym that the fire marshal came and compelled some to move, said Kevin Hurley, Criss' fellow meet director. This year, more teams are stationed outside under large tents.

Also last year, there was also an issue with loudspeakers outside to call swimmers to their races disturbing a funeral across the street at Sherwood Memorial Park, but Johnson checked to make sure there were no funerals this weekend.

Organizers also added more spectator seating this year, after parents had a hard time seeing their children compete.

Several parents said this year's meet was noticeably smoother than last year's.

Criss, who clutched a walkie-talkie and roamed the event putting out fires, will be glad to hear that the hard work paid off.

"I am beat by the time the weekend is over," he said, "along with a lot of other people."