How to use DeckSide.

DeckSide is a Windows desktop app. Grab the installer and run it — no admin rights needed for a per-user install. download.sportside.app/deckside

Mac and iPad support is on the roadmap. If you're on a Mac and want to be notified when there's a build for you, email support@sportside.app.

The fastest way is the GoMotion swimmer PDF: download your swimmer's full results PDF from your team's GoMotion site, then drag it onto DeckSide. Every meet, every event, every time gets parsed in one shot — no typing.

If you don't have a GoMotion account, you can add a swimmer manually (name, age, gender) and let meet imports fill in their times as the season goes. In-app how-to guides walk you through both paths.

DeckSide reads two PDF formats coaches and meet directors already produce:

• HY-TEK Meet Manager program PDF — the pre-meet program your team sends out the night before. Useful for seeing who's in which heat.
• SwimTopia Meet Maestro post-meet PDF — the official results after the meet. This is where your swimmer's new times come from.

Drop the PDF on the Meets screen. DeckSide figures out the meet name, date, course, and every result automatically. Your swimmer's dashboard updates the moment the import finishes.

Open My Swimmer Dashboard. Three things to look at:

• Best Times table — every event your swimmer has swum, with their lifetime PB and season PB side by side. Cross-season improvements pick up a 2025 → 2026 badge so you can see what's actually getting faster.
• Progression chart — a time-vs-date line for any event, filterable by season. Watching the line bend down across the summer is the whole point.
• CHAMPS Readiness gauge — a quick read on which events your swimmer has the strongest shot at qualifying or placing in based on current times vs. last year's CHAMPS field.

DeckSide takes care of backups for you. When you launch the app, it writes a daily snapshot to %APPDATA%\DeckSide\backups\auto\ (24-hour cooldown so it doesn't spam if you open the app five times a day). It keeps the most recent 14 snapshots and prunes the rest.

You can also export a manual .json backup from the toolbar — handy before a big import, or if you're moving DeckSide to a new laptop. Restore is the same toolbar, one click.

Grab the Windows installer from download.sportside.app/deckside. Per-user install, no admin rights. First launch asks for your home team code (e.g. BLU) — that's the team DeckSide will treat as "us" for scoring, lineups, and check-in.

Import your roster from a GoMotion team-roster PDF, or add swimmers manually. Names, ages, and gender are all DeckSide needs to start.

The night before the meet, the host team sends out a HY-TEK Meet Manager program PDF. Drag it onto the Meets screen. DeckSide parses every heat, lane, event, and swimmer in one shot — no retyping a 60-event meet by hand.

DeckSide holds multiple meets side-by-side. The top-bar meet switcher lets you flip between this week's program, last meet's results, and your intra-squad without losing context — handy when a parent walks up mid-warmup asking what their kid swam two weeks ago.

Open the Lineup tab. Auto-fill seeds each event with suggestions based on this season's times plus last year's CHAMPS field, so you're not staring at a blank grid. Drag and drop swimmers between lanes to override.

• Per-stroke PB chips next to each name so you can see at a glance whether you're putting your best 50 Free in lane 4.
• Dual and tri-meet scoring projections update live as you move swimmers — see the projected team total shift before you commit.

Prefer the browser? The Web Lineup Builder runs the same logic from any device — useful if you're sketching on a phone the morning of.

Pool-deck wifi is going to fail you. Open the Announcer tab the night before and pre-synth every heat while you're still on home wifi.

• Voice picker — Microsoft Edge neural voices: Ava, Andrew, Aria, Brian, Christopher, Emma. Pick one that doesn't mangle your team's name.
• Multi-voice cache — synth a backup voice too, in case the first one sounds off over the loudspeaker.
• Pronunciation overrides via CSV — fix the names the neural voice keeps butchering once, and the override sticks across every future meet.

Open the Check-In tab when swimmers start showing up. Roster is grouped by team and age band so you're not scrolling a flat list of 200 names. Tap a swimmer to mark present, scratched, or leaving early.

Tap the pencil icon on any swimmer to leave a quick note ("left after event 22", "ankle, no fly"). Notes thread through to the Event Log so whoever's announcing or scoring later sees the same context.

Back to the Announcer tab. Heats read aloud with the voice you cached the night before — no live network needed.

• No-show toggle — tap a lane mid-announce to skip it without restarting the heat.
• Auto-advance — heat ends, next heat queues up. Cadence presets (relaxed / standard / brisk) so you can match the pace of your starter.
• Start-the-race sequence — green flash on the screen as the announce ends, so the timer or starter sees it from across the deck.
• First-name-only mode for 8-and-unders, when you don't want the loudspeaker booming a kindergartener's full legal name across the park.
• Compact 8-lane layout fits without scrolling on a 13" laptop — important when you're standing at the announce table.

Drop the post-meet PDF on the Meets screen — DeckSide reads both HY-TEK Meet Manager results and SwimTopia Meet Maestro exports. New times land in seconds.

Open the Season Dashboard:

• Projected CHAMPS Total — running estimate of your team's CHAMPS points based on current best times vs. last year's field.
• CHAMPS Readiness tiers — every swimmer/event slot bucketed as On Track, Close, Behind, or No data. Tells you where to spend warmup time on Saturday.
• Top Improvers — who dropped the most time this week. Good for the Monday email.
• At Risk — swimmers slower than they were at the same point last year. Click any name for a cross-season profile.

Click any name in the Swimmers tab for a full-page profile: Best Times table, Progression chart with a season filter, and that swimmer's CHAMPS Readiness across every event they could swim. Useful for parent conferences, mid-season conversations, and end-of-season writeups.

Grab the Windows installer from download.sportside.app/deckside. Per-user install, no admin rights. On first launch, set your home team code (e.g. BLU) — that's the team DeckSide treats as "us" for lineup and scoring.

Then flip on Director mode in Settings. Director mode is what separates the meet-table laptop from a coach's laptop: it unlocks visitor-team editing in Check-In, the full Event Log, the Time Issues queue, and the live Meet Points scoreboard. A coach-only install will hide those tabs.

The host team's HY-TEK Meet Manager program PDF goes out the night before. Drop it on the Meets screen — DeckSide parses every event, heat, lane, and swimmer in one pass.

Open the Schedule tab and walk the heat order top to bottom. This is the document everyone on deck will be working from on Saturday, so it's worth catching anything weird — a missing relay, an event that imported with the wrong distance — before warmup. The Schedule view also drives the on-deck / next-up board in the Deck tab.

By mid-season you'll have a folder full of programs, results PDFs, and CHAMPS exports. The Meet Inventory tab is the one screen that shows everything DeckSide has imported, with per-file controls:

• Rename a meet that imported with a wonky title.
• Re-import if the host posted a corrected PDF after the meet.
• Delete a test or duplicate import without touching your real data.
• Cache now to force a fresh parse if you suspect the stored copy is stale.

Worth a five-minute pass the week before a big meet, and again after CHAMPS, to keep the season tidy.

Open the Check-In tab. In Director mode you see every team at the meet — home and visitors — grouped by team and age band. Mark present, scratched, or leaving early across the board.

The visitor coach walking up mid-warmup with a handwritten scratch list is the whole reason this screen exists. You process their scratches in the same view you use for your home roster, and the changes flow straight into the heat sheets the announcer is reading from. No more "wait, who's actually in Lane 3?" five seconds before the start.

Tap the pencil icon on any swimmer for a quick note ("left after event 22", "ankle, no fly"). Those notes thread through to the Event Log automatically.

The Deck tab is the at-a-glance heat board: current heat, on-deck heat, next-up heat. Large type, no clutter. This is what you mirror to the scoreboard screen swimmers and parents are looking at from across the pool.

As heats close, Deck advances automatically — the on-deck heat slides into the current slot, next-up steps forward. If anything goes sideways (long delay, a swim-off inserted), you can hold or jump heats from this same screen without breaking the scoreboard feed.

The Event Log is the official per-heat record of what actually happened. Tap any heat row to log it with structured tag notes:

• DQ with stroke-judge reason
• No-show on a specific lane
• Equipment issue (touchpad miss, lane line, stuck block)
• Time-judge call when the backup timers override
• Swim-off inserted between events

Pencil notes from Check-In ("ankle, no fly") auto-flow into the relevant heat rows, so you're not retyping context. The Event Log is the document you'd hand a referee in a protest meeting — if it's not in the log, it didn't happen.

The Time Issues tab surfaces every heat where the recorded time doesn't match what the time judges or backup-timer card logged. The classic case: the time judge swears Lane 4 was 31.42, not 32.14 — but the meet has already moved three heats on.

Each flagged heat opens a Change Order: reason code, original time, corrected time, who called it. Apply it and the official Meet Points scoreboard, the Event Log, and the post-meet export all update in lockstep. No silent edits — every change is stamped and visible.

This is the difference between "the meet is done" and "the meet is right".

The Meet Points tab is the live scoreboard during the meet and the final scorecard after. It runs the standard EBSL-style 30-place point arrays for dual meets and 25-place for tri-meets, recomputed every time a heat closes or a Change Order lands.

When the last heat is in, the Post Meet tab exports the official PDF for the league. The same PDF then drops back into every coach's DeckSide on the next import — your Event Log corrections, scratches, and time changes all carried through. One source of truth, end to end.