Hy-Tek Team Manager

From Libre Aquatics Wiki, the free aquatics reference

Hy-Tek Team Manager is a Windows program in which a swimming club keeps its roster, its swimmers’ results and best times, and the entries it sends to meets.¹² It is the club-side counterpart of Hy-Tek Meet Manager: a club declares its entries in Team Manager and exports them to the meet host, the host seeds and runs the meet in Meet Manager, and the results file comes back to update each swimmer’s times.³⁴ The two programs have been advertised as a pair since 1986.⁵

Hy-Tek Sports Software publishes it, and The Active Network has owned the company since 2008.⁶ The current version is Team Manager 8.0, released on 15 December 2015 and still receiving maintenance updates in 2026.⁷⁸

Role in a club¶

Team Manager is the program a club, school or league runs between meets, and nearly everything in it serves that cycle. Its records are teams, coaches and athletes; meets with their events; results; time standards; records; and, as an option, workouts.⁹ Hy-Tek intends one person to be able to carry most of a team’s administration with it: keeping the roster and contact details, making entries, loading results after a meet, and producing reports for coaches, swimmers and parents.¹

Because every result is stored against an athlete, the best times used for entries and the times in the reports come from the same records. The reports are the program’s main output: top times, seasonal spreadsheets, improvement and goal tracking, time-standard and record matching, meet eligibility, split sheets, attendance, and mailing and award labels.⁹¹⁰ Hy-Tek’s 1991 advertising lists most of the same items, which suggests the program’s scope has changed little since its DOS versions.¹¹

The program is not limited to USA Swimming clubs. It supports high school, college, Masters and age-group teams, and the guide carries dedicated setups for Masters, which uses five-year age groups for records and rankings, and for the British Columbia Summer Swimming Association, whose divisions and registration numbers the program builds automatically.¹²¹³ A British club can load historical times extracted from British Swimming’s rankings database.⁴

History¶

The earliest firm record of Team Manager is an October 1986 advertisement pairing it with Meet Manager, and by May 1989 Hy-Tek was selling it as one of six programs for the IBM-PC and compatibles.⁵¹⁴ A survey in Swimming Technique in November 1990, editorial rather than advertising, describes what the combination made possible: team and meet data passed between computers by modem in one telephone call, after which a swimmer’s times could be graphed, ranked, and checked against records and standards. The same article names the competing club programs of the time, Easy Meet’s Easy Team Manager and the Team 1000 from ProGrams Sports Software.¹⁵ Entries in that period travelled by Commlink, Hy-Tek’s own exchange product, usually on a posted diskette.¹⁶

The move to Windows came in two steps. The first Windows version, WIN-TM, was a 16-bit program for Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT and 2000.¹⁷ Its release date is recorded inconsistently: a Hy-Tek advertisement in the January 1998 Swimming Technique offers Team Manager for Windows as available then, while Hy-Tek’s newsletter of August 2000 dates the release to April 1998.¹⁸¹⁷ WIN-TM reached release 1.6R before Hy-Tek replaced it with a complete 32-bit rewrite, Team Manager II, which began shipping on 30 April 2001. Hy-Tek priced the upgrade from WIN-TM at $69 and gave away a cut-down edition, TM II Lite, so that clubs without the program could still send entries to a meet electronically.¹⁷¹⁹

Team Manager II went through releases numbered 2 and 3, the third out by December 2002, and was followed by Team Manager 4.0 in March 2004, which Hy-Tek said added over a hundred features.²⁰²¹ Over the same period the company added web services around the desktop program. Team Manager Online, a hosted copy of a team’s data, opened in October 2002, and a Windows Workout Manager shipped the same month and was then advertised together with Team Manager II.²⁰²² Team Manager 5.0 went into production on 7 April 2008, three months before the Active acquisition.²³⁶

Hy-Tek released Team Manager 8.0 on 15 December 2015, and it remains the current version. Its updates have mostly tracked outside changes, such as new World Aquatics points tables and revised USA Swimming motivational standards, along with bug fixes.⁸

Versions¶

Hy-Tek’s guide counts Team Manager in generations and lists the conversion path from each.²¹

Generation	Version	Platform	Released
1	Team Manager for DOS	DOS	by October 1986
2	WIN-TM, releases to 1.6	16-bit Windows	1998
3	Team Manager II, releases 2 and 3	32-bit Windows	30 April 2001
4	Team Manager 4.0	Windows	12 March 2004
5–7	Team Manager 5.0, 6.0, 7.0	Windows	5.0 on 7 April 2008
8	Team Manager 8.0	Windows	15 December 2015

The dates come from Hy-Tek’s advertising and its own dated release announcements.⁵¹⁸¹⁷¹⁹²⁰²³⁷

The count contains a small conflict. The conversion page places versions 5.0 to 7.0 in the fifth to seventh generations, which makes 8.0 the eighth, but the introduction to the same guide calls 8.0 the seventh generation.²¹²⁴ The introduction appears to have been carried over from the 7.0 guide, and this article follows the conversion page.

Upgrading is not always possible. A TM 8.0 program opens any database from 5.0 onward unchanged and converts one from 4.0 or Team Manager II automatically, backing up the old file first. A WIN-TM database can move only by exporting its swimmers and results and importing them again, and Hy-Tek offers no route at all from the DOS program. The conversion cannot be undone: a converted database is stored in a newer Microsoft Access format that earlier versions cannot open, so every computer sharing a team’s data has to be upgraded at once.²¹

Entries and results¶

The exchange with a meet host is the part of Team Manager other software has to accommodate. The meet host usually starts it by exporting the meet’s event list from Meet Manager and sending it to each team. The team imports that file, marks which swimmers are swimming which events, and exports the entries back.³ With the full program an athlete’s entry time is filled in from the best times already in the database; the free Lite edition has no history to draw on, so each entry time has to be typed.³

The entry export is a single zip archive named for the team and the meet, which holds two files describing the same entries: an HY3 and a CL2. Hy-Tek includes both so that whatever program the meet host uses can read one of them. Its own current programs read the HY3, which carries more, including pre-assigned heats and lanes and longer names, while most other meet software reads the CL2.²⁵ A team whose meet host wants the published standard can convert an exported CL2 to an SDIF file, with Hy-Tek’s warning that SDIF was designed for USA Swimming meets and drops fields its own formats keep.²⁶

Results come back the same way in reverse. Team Manager reads HY3, CL2 and zipped files from Hy-Tek programs, and SDIF files from other meet software.⁴¹⁰ When it imports a file it identifies each swimmer by registration number first, confirming the match against gender and surname, and otherwise by full name, gender and team. A swimmer entered under a different name at the meet, such as a nickname, does not match and appears on an exception report instead. Splits, reaction times and disqualification codes come across when the meet file contains them.⁴

Registration and governing bodies¶

Team Manager also carries a club’s paperwork to its governing body. Its registration module is built around the way USA Swimming registers swimmers nationally: it tracks each swimmer’s status as new, renewed, changed, deleted or upgraded, and exports those who have changed since the last batch as a numbered SDIF file for the club’s registration chair.²⁷ Hy-Tek says the module is meant only for USA Swimming teams and tells summer leagues to use custom fields instead.¹⁰ Several 4.0 updates between 2004 and 2007 were released only to follow USA Swimming’s registration changes for the next year.²⁰²³

Data also flows back from the governing body. Team Manager 8.0 imports a team’s roster and results from USA Swimming’s SWIMS database, and national-meet entries from USA Swimming’s online entry system, each as an HY3 file that USA Swimming supplies for download.²⁸

Packages and editions¶

Team Manager 8.0 is sold in three packages, and a club’s licence records which one it bought.²⁹ As listed in 2026:

Package	Price	Adds
Bronze	$170	the base program: roster, entries, results, reports, and the two web services
Silver	$395	records and time standards, results prediction, a journal and recruiting notes, entry and award labels, graphs, and a multi-user network option
Gold	$570	the Workout Manager options: workouts, training paces, and export to pace clocks

The prices are from Hy-Tek’s store and the contents from the package descriptions in its guide.⁷²⁹

An upgrade from 7.0 or earlier costs $59, and moving up a package afterwards costs the difference in steps, from $175 to $400.⁷ The results-prediction option simulates a meet from the best times of two teams in the database, which Hy-Tek aims at high school and college dual meets.²⁹

The free edition, TM Lite, continues what TM II Lite began in 2001. It is the full program with limits: three meets, two teams and a hundred athletes, three of the program’s exports with the entry export among them, and printing of the entry report only.³¹⁹ It doubles as the evaluation copy.³⁰

A licence belongs to a team rather than a computer, and the program prints the licence name on every report. A volunteer keeping records for two clubs on one laptop has to switch between the two licences inside the program, because Windows will not install it twice.³¹ In 2026 Hy-Tek added a warning before a licence expires; the release notes for June 2026 show that a program whose licence lapses is reduced to the Lite edition.⁸

Web services¶

Two online services come free with Team Manager 8.0.²⁹ Team Connect Online keeps a master copy of a team’s database on Hy-Tek’s server, so coaches and volunteers on different computers can download it and send back their edits under permissions an administrator sets. Hy-Tek recommends broadband for it and requires every user to be on the same program version.³²²¹ Team Stats Online publishes a team’s rosters, top times, graphs, results, upcoming entries, standards and records for swimmers and parents to browse, sort and filter.³³

Team Stats Online appears to be the earlier Team Manager Online under a new name. Hy-Tek released Team Manager Online 2.0 in September 2004, and the service’s old address still serves a page headed Team Stats Online version 2.0C. No source states the rename, so it is an inference from the address and the version number.²⁰³⁴ The separate Team Connect Online service has its own page.

Pace clock export¶

With the Gold package, Team Manager sends workouts written in its Workout Manager module to a pace clock, so a coach does not re-key a session into the clock. Hy-Tek lists the supported targets as the Colorado Time Systems equipment it calls CTS 4, CTS 5 and CTS 6, and the Daktronics OmniSport 2000, OmniSport 6000 and PC 2000. Transfers use a serial port with a straight RS-232 cable, except to the OmniSport 6000, which takes the workout on a floppy disk.³⁵

The two vendors name the required option differently. Hy-Tek’s package list puts a separate Workout Manager Pace Clock option in the Gold package, while the Daktronics PC-2001 manual makes the Workout Manager Basic option the prerequisite.²⁹³⁶ Both statements may be true if the pace-clock option depends on the basic one, but neither source says so. Daktronics specifies a 20-foot cable with a DB9 serial connector at the computer and a stereo phone plug at the clock.³⁶

Workout Manager began in 1990 as a separate program, which is why some documents credit the download to Workout Manager and others to Team Manager.³⁷³⁶ The pace clock controller article covers the download from the clock’s side.

Adoption¶

No independent count of Team Manager users exists. The figures available are Hy-Tek’s, for the company as a whole, and are covered in the Meet Manager article.

Other people’s documents show how widely it was used. Canadian clubs advertising for coaches in SwimNews asked for experience with Hy-Tek software from December 1994, and a 2006 advertisement names Team Manager specifically.³⁸³⁹ In 2007 SwimNews moved its own Tiny Olympic Prospects programme onto entry files exported from Team Manager.⁴⁰ Governing bodies also rely on its file format. USA Swimming distributes rosters and results to clubs as HY3 files that Team Manager imports directly, and local policy manuals that require Hy-Tek entry files are described in the Meet Manager article.²⁸

Competing products are built around it as well. SwimTopia documents a migration from Team Manager and describes its team product as a replacement for it that still exchanges files with Meet Manager.⁴¹⁴² Active’s own web product, ACTIVEWorks Swim Manager, sits alongside Team Manager rather than replacing it: Team Manager’s release notes include fixes for importing Swim Manager entry files and for synchronising with it.⁸

Compared with other club software¶

Team Manager is a desktop program with a local database. The club web services that compete with it keep a team’s data online and add registration, billing and communication with families, which Team Manager covers only through its separate web services and Active’s other products.³²⁴²

TeamUnify, founded in 2007 in Bend, Oregon, and bought by SportsEngine in 2016, gave its own reach then as 4,000 swimming organizations.⁴³
SwimTopia was started by a swim-team parent and imports a Team Manager database directly.⁴⁴⁴¹
Splash Team Manager, from Splash Software, has the same name but is a different program from a different company.

References¶

HY-TEK, How to get started. ↩ ↩²
HY-TEK, Team Manager for Swimming (product page). ↩
HY-TEK, TEAM MANAGER Lite. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
HY-TEK, Import meet results. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Hy-Tek advertisement, Swimming World, October 1986 (Team Manager and Meet Manager). ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Active Network, Acquisition of HY-TEK Sports Software Businesses (8 July 2008). ↩ ↩²
HY-TEK, Team Manager 8.0 store page (release date and prices, as of 2026). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
HY-TEK, TEAM MANAGER 8.0 service pack release notes (8.0Ca 2015 to 8.0Gf 2026). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
HY-TEK, TEAM MANAGER 8.0 for Swimming user guide (contents). ↩ ↩²
HY-TEK, TEAM MANAGER frequently asked questions. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hy-Tek Team Manager product copy, Swimming World, August 1991 (Special Section: Computer). ↩
HY-TEK, Masters. ↩
HY-TEK, BCSSA. ↩
Hy-Tek advertisement, Swimming Technique, May 1989 (six programs for the IBM-PC). ↩
Swim software survey, Swimming Technique, November 1990 (modem transfer; competing team programs). ↩
Hy-Tek Commlink advertisement, Swimming World, August 1991 (entries by diskette to the meet director). ↩
Hy-Tek swim newsletter, August 2000 (WIN-TM April 1998; TM II planned). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Hy-Tek advertisement, Swimming Technique, January 1998 (Team Manager for Windows). ↩ ↩²
Hy-Tek, What’s new, November 2001 (TM II shipping 30 April 2001; TM II Lite). ↩ ↩² ↩³
Hy-Tek, What’s new, 2002–2005 (TM Online, TM 3.0 and 4.0). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
HY-TEK, Convert database to TM 8.0 (the generations). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Hy-Tek advertisement, Swimming World, November 2002 (Team Manager Online; Team Manager II and Workout Manager). ↩
Hy-Tek, What’s new, 2006–2008 (TM 4.0Ra; TM 5.0 on 7 April 2008). ↩ ↩² ↩³
HY-TEK, TEAM MANAGER 8.0 introduction. ↩
HY-TEK, Export meet entries. ↩
HY-TEK, Convert Hy-Tek export file to SDIF. ↩
HY-TEK, Export registration. ↩
HY-TEK, Import SWIMS roster or NCAA roster (HY3 from USA Swimming). ↩ ↩²
HY-TEK, TM product packages. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
HY-TEK, Evaluation edition. ↩
HY-TEK, License management. ↩
HY-TEK, Team Connect Online. ↩ ↩²
HY-TEK, Team Stats Online. ↩
HY-TEK, Team Stats Online team selection (Version 2.0C, at the TMOnline address). ↩
HY-TEK, Export pace clock. ↩
Daktronics, PC-2001 Pace Clock System Display Manual (ED-13737 Rev 09, August 2023), Team Manager workout download. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Swim Biz News item, Swimming World, September 1990 (Workout Manager released; updates across the line). ↩
Coaching vacancy advertisement, SwimNews, December 1994 (proficiency with Hy-Tek software). ↩
Coaching vacancy advertisement, SwimNews, April 2006 (knowledge of Hy-Tek Team Manager). ↩
TOP programme notice, SwimNews, February 2007 (entries by Hy-Tek files from Team Manager). ↩
SwimTopia, Team Manager time history and roster import (.mdb). ↩ ↩²
SwimTopia, HY-TEK compatibility (vendor page). ↩ ↩²
SportsEngine, SportsEngine acquires TeamUnify (21 July 2016). ↩
SwimTopia, About (vendor page). ↩

Last updated September 25, 2026.