← Spark & Whetstone · What a Time Standard Means
B, BB, A, AA, AAA, AAAA: the letters on a time-standard table look like grades. They are a base time plus a fixed number of steps. Type a time and your table, and see what the letter is made of.
Filled in with one example: 10 & under girls, 50 freestyle, short-course yards. Pick any age, event and pool from the 2024–28 table, or type the six cuts from the table your club or meet uses — a table you type always wins.
Source of the example: USA Swimming 2024–2028 Motivational Standards (published 2024-08-29). One event quoted for teaching.
Earlier swims of the same event in the same kind of pool, separated by commas. The Cut Card compares a swimmer only with themselves.
A letter is not a percentile. The table counts no swimmers, so it cannot say a B swimmer is “in the top 30%”. Even a real percentile would count only children with a recorded meet time — the ones who never entered are not in the number. And a best time is the quickest of several swims, so the next one is usually a little slower; that is not a slump.
That is why this card compares a swim only with the same swimmer’s own earlier times (the Own-Lane rule from Spark & Anvil’s design laws). The four lessons of What a Time Standard Means go further; children meet the same line in SplitForge’s Hidden Base.
Only the one example table above ships with this page; everything else is what you type. Nothing is stored or sent.