Man o' Tea said:
I used to officiate a YMCA league and
they had their own rulebook. Some of
the swimmers had to remember different
rules when they swam in high school.
True. There are many sanctioning bodies. Some predate FINA, USS, USMS,
etc, by many years. Due to local need, simple inertia, lack of
communication, NIH bias, or whatever, some have rules that are a bit
different from the norm.
In recent years, most of the bodies have made a conscious effort to
converge toward a common set of rules. There are still a few oddities
here or there, but most are minor. It's interesting just to point out
the few that still exist.
For example, USMS still allows the frog kick in butterfly. Not because
you or I would want to use the frog kick in a butterfly race, but
because some older members (including my swimming buddy Jim) learned the
butterfly long ago with the frog kick and have trouble learning a
dolphin kick now.
This thread is a similar example. I couldn't think of any jurisdictions
that required using front crawl in a freestyle race, even though I
realize that nearly everybody would in fact use some sort of front
crawl. Jtaylor (helpfully - thanks!) managed to find a few.
Ross