What is myPBs.net?
myPBs.net is a web community for swimmers all over the world. Swimmers can keep track of their times, and compare themselves with others. To compare times of boys and girls of different ages the SwimRating formula is used.
The SwimRating is a system to be able to compare different types of swimmers objectively. It works by calculating back all a swimmer's personal best times to 50-meter times. So the PB on the 100 meters is divided by two, the 200 by four, and so forth. Then all these times are accumulated, and this is the SwimRating. This way, sprinters and stayers have equal chances of scoring high on this list.
To provide equal chances for swimmers of different agegroups, there is the 'Relative Rating'. This is a swimmer's SwimRating as an inversed percentage of the 90th percentile US time standards for his or her agegroup. In the following graph you can see the SwimRating scores of those 90th percentile times. So if you're under the line you have a Relative Rating of more than 100, if you're above it's less than 100.
For yards instead of meters, the SwimRating is multiplied by 1.116 and a 500 freestyle is assumed instead of a 400. For age 12 and under, the 200 fly/back/breast and the 400 IM are not taken into account. For age 10 and under, also the 400 freestyle is not included in the rating. This is why 12 and under can only have a Relative Rating, their SwimRating would obviously be lower since they do not swim all events!
Current distribution of Relative Ratings in the database:
65
70
75
80
85
90
95
100
105
110
For the system to function properly, we of course depend on your honesty for entering true times. It is easy to enter fake times, and there is no real way to check that. But if you ever see someone in the list, who you know is higher then he should be, you can :).