Running Your Own Meet, Uploading to Swim Central
Your club creates and runs the meet; Swim Central handles registration. Three Meet Exchange steps bridge the two.
The whole journey
Three of these six steps happen in Meet Exchange (bold, orange). The other three happen in the Swim Club Connect app or on Swim Central itself — included here so you can see where Meet Exchange fits, not as something to learn from this page.
- App create the meet and its events in Swim Club Connect
-
Export meet events
Meet Exchange — produces the
.ev3file you upload to Swim Central - External families nominate their swimmers on Swim Central
-
Import nominations
Meet Exchange — brings Swim Central's
.hy3entries into your meet - App run the meet on the pool deck
- Export results Meet Exchange — produces the results file for Swim Central
Create your meet
This happens in the Swim Club Connect app, not Meet Exchange. Set up the meet and its events the normal way before coming here. This guide picks up once the meet already exists.
Export the meet structure (.ev3)
On the meet's operations page, under Send data out, tap Export meet events. This produces the .ev3 file — the meet's events and structure — ready to upload to Swim Central.
A Hy-Tek file needs a properly structured venue address — city, state, postcode, and the host club's Local Swimming Committee (LSC). If your meet doesn't have one confirmed yet, a dialog appears asking you to fill it in before the export can continue.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| City / suburb | Free text |
| State | Dropdown — the eight Australian states/territories |
| Postcode | You'll see a hint if it doesn't look like 4 digits, but it won't block you |
| Country | Fixed to AUS |
| Host LSC | Dropdown — follows your State selection automatically until you pick one yourself, then stays put |
Cancelling is completely safe.
If you cancel this dialog, nothing is saved and the export simply stops — there's no partial or broken state to clean up. Confirm the venue and it retries the export automatically.
Once it succeeds, the .ev3 file downloads straight to your computer, named after the meet. Upload that file to Swim Central to open registration.
Families nominate on Swim Central
This happens entirely on Swim Central, outside Swim Club Connect. Once nominations close, Swim Central gives you a .hy3 entries file to download — that's what the next step needs.
Import nominations (.hy3)
Under Bring data in, tap Import nominations. This is a three-step process — nothing is imported until you explicitly confirm on the second step.
Choose the file
Tap Choose .hy3 file and select the entries file from Swim Central. Nothing is sent anywhere yet — the file is only read on your own computer at this point. Tap Preview import when you're ready to see what it contains.
Review and resolve each team
The preview lists every team found in the file, alongside the meet's name, start date, and entry counts, so you can double-check it's the right file before going further. Each team shows one of three states:
- Auto-matched — the team's Hy-Tek code already matches a club on file. Nothing to do.
- Not resolved — an unfamiliar team. Tap Map to club to search for and select the real club it corresponds to, or Skip to leave that team's entries out of this import.
- Mapped or Will skip — your decision, once made.
Once you map a team, it's remembered.
A team you manually map here will auto-match on every future import — you only ever resolve a given club once.
Tap Execute import once every team is resolved.
Check the summary
The final screen answers the question that actually matters: what happened to your meet, and is anything worth double-checking? Headline counts (nominations added/updated, swimmers matched, swimmers newly created) sit at the top.
Always glance at "New swimmers created."
Anyone not already on file gets a new profile. A name or birth-date typo in the file can create a duplicate of a swimmer who already exists — this list is your one chance to catch that before it causes confusion later.
Run the meet
Back in the Swim Club Connect app, not Meet Exchange. See Starting races and Keeping time for running the meet itself on the pool deck.
Export results (.hy3 + .cl2)
Once the meet's finished, tap Export results under Send data out. This is the one operation reserved for the hosting club — a visiting club can't export another club's meet results.
It downloads a zip file containing both a .hy3 and a .cl2 file — Meet Manager's own results-export format — ready to upload to Swim Central.
A whole-meet export can span several clubs.
If anything's wrong, you may see issues for a club other than your own — that's expected for a multi-club meet, and worth passing on to whoever administers that club if you can't fix it yourself.
Export blocked? Both export operations check that every club involved has a Hy-Tek team code and that every swimmer has a valid birth date and gender on file. See Using Meet Exchange for what a missing team code actually means and when it fixes itself automatically.
That's the whole loop
Export the structure, import what comes back, export results when you're done. The two file-based steps in the middle — export and import — are the same shape every time, whichever meet you're running.
Hosting other clubs as well as your own? That's a different scenario — see Using Meet Exchange for the other guides.