With advances in technology over recent years, some of the local neighborhood outdoor swimming pools now have automatic timing systems installed that are used for summer swim meets.

That means those old hard plastic scoreboards with white backgrounds and black numbers that are hung up behind all six lanes to display the hand-recorded times of each swimmer during meets are no longer necessary at those pools.

However, those old boards haven’t yet all been replaced by automatic scoreboards that display all of the times in a quick manner. With the new boards, swimmers and spectators have no place to immediately look to find the times. Hopefully, some type of at least a portable electronic scoreboard will become available for all to see.

So for now, many pools still use the old scoreboard system, which is a good thing for multiple reasons.

A neat feature about those old scoreboards is when any swimmer or relay set records, those swimmers often stand underneath the boards to have a keepsake photo or two taken. The record times are displayed in the background above their heads. Such photos aren’t as easy to take, if at all, with no electronic scoreboards.

A couple of Kent Gardens Dolphins girls relay teams had such photos taken in meets this summer when the foursomes set pool marks. They proudly had their photos taken under those old boards.

Look on the various Twitter sites of many of the summer teams and such photos have been posted throughout the 2022 season. Pictures of record- holders with those old scoreboards in the background also appear on league Twitter sites, like for the Northern Virginia Swimming League.

So those old scoreboards still effectively serve a big purpose in different ways. So much so that maybe they shouldn’t all be replaced.

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