Re-Creating America's Club Swimming System by John Leonard, Executive Director, ASCA

Part 2:  Need to Invest in our people and clubs

More of this Feature • Part 1: What's Wrong? • Part 2: Need to Invest! • Part 3: We're Afraid • Part 4: Is Club Swimming Important?   Join the Discussion "The National Governing Body for swimming in the USA is USA-Swimming. Does it work to benefit swimmers in the best possible way? Do our swimming clubs have what they need to continue to compete at the world level, or will our countries size continue to allow us to luck into a enough good swimmers from time to time to keep us happy with the status quo? What systems do other countries use that seem to work? Look at the Aussies - much smaller than the USA, but as good or better in many areas. Why?" About Swimming Guide      Related Resources • Governing Bodies • Find your team • Other Aquatic Sports    Elsewhere on the Web • ASCA Online • Seven Traits of a Successful Age Group Swim Club

Number Three - Our Best People Don't Invest in Our Clubs, and our Clubs Don't Invest in Their Best People

When I ask clubs, "what is your greatest asset?" over 85% of them respond "our coach". Yet our coaches are not "invested" in the club, unless they own it. And even then, they don't put too much of themselves into their assistant coaches. Why? Because no one is more popular in a swim club than the assistant coach. He never has to make any hard calls, he can be a good listener, without having to say "no" to anything, and the assistant is always loved and liked and well spoken of…so they are "encouraged" to go off on their own…sometimes with a significant proportion of the old club's clientele, and start a new club down the street. And United States Swimming, through its Local Swim Committees, allows this to happen. "Screw the producing club member we have who is doing a good job and has been for 20 years, let's allow this other club to open next door and we'll have another USA Swimming Club! Hooray!"

What nonsense. Hurt your established franchise that is producing for you, so you can have a new, unproven franchise open up. This is called cannibalization, and we wind up with a lot of dinky little clubs that can't properly pay coaches, support a pool, support a productive program, and its led by our least experienced parents and our youngest and least experienced coaches, who two years later are selling insurance instead of coaching, because it was "too hard". Oh, and by the way, in one of the most important by-products of this, we split up what used to be dense groups of hard working productive senior training groups and put those athletes in many small, fragmented, non-competitive groups. Training disaster for senior swimmers.

And where did all those 50 swimmers go who swam on the new team? Look at the soccer fields of America.

The Need in Search of a Solution? We need to protect our programs that are producing for USA Swimming and keep them from being cannibalized by ineffective convenience clubs that come and go. Ask USA Swimming how many convenience clubs there are, with less than 100 swimmers? It's about 80% of our club population. It is pretty darn hard to financially support a professional coach with less than 100 swimmers on a team, unless they are very wealthy. And we have a relatively new phenomenon in the last 10 years, we now have some large (numerically) non-productive (in terms of fast senior swimming) clubs who exist as glorified (or not so glorified) baby-sitting services with a lot of fees being paid in.

Number Four - Our Decisions are Made on Guesses

American swimming is an anecdotal experience. Nowhere in our club system, neither locally nor nationally, do we base our decisions on FACTS. In point of case, we don't even gather real statistics. We don't know "real things". So our clubs make "best guesses" on things ranging from how to train 10 and unders effectively, to how to recruit new swimmers, to how to organize an effort for a new indoor 50 meter pool, to how to develop a fee structure for our club.

We have no developed statistical basis for any decision we make. We guess, we guess, we guess. And then we are surprised that we're wrong. Why is this? Because USA Swimming evolved in 1978 from the old AAU and we are still using the basic organizational structure from the 1950's and 1960's in an 2000's world. We still have Local Swim Committees (LSC) as a unit of organization for USA Swimming. USA Swimming has historically thought of its organizational units as the LSC. That's wrong. USA Swimming's mission is providing a great experience in swimming for large numbers of youngsters and from that group, creating the greatest swim team on earth, the USA National Team. No LSC does either of those things. The LSC does not recruit athletes. The club does. The LSC does not train the athlete. The Coach and club do. The LSC does not create an environment where excellence can flourish. The Club and Coach do. In short the LSC contributes NOTHING to our national mission, except another layer of bureaucratic "stuff".

The basic unit of USA Swimming is THE CLUB. NOT the LSC. USA Swimming needs to relate to the club. The Club needs to relate to USA Swimming. USA Swimming should be collecting, directly from the club, information on EVERYTHING from finance to training. And re-distributing this information to all their clubs who chose to use it. Real information. Statistical information. Something the club can make good decisions on. The business of the ASCA is coaches. The business of USA Swimming, is the Club.

We don't need LSCs. They are a political hangover that modern communications and business have made obsolete and an impediment to Professionally run clubs. We need real information from a national base. Real information makes better decisions possible.

The Need in Search of a Solution? We need real information to improve our club businesses from USA Swimming.

Number Five - Clubs Need A Base

Swimmers come from somewhere. They come from learn to swim programs. Yet fewer than 15% of current USA Swim Clubs actually operate their own Learn to Swim Programs. So where to swimmers come from in these clubs? They transfer from other swim clubs! Like shuffling clients, rather than creating new ones. Not much of a way to grow an industry, is it?

I am getting this figure from 1500 recent club coach questionnaires returned to the ASCA. Lets say that I am way off, 100% off….that means that 30% of the USA Swimming Clubs run swim lessons. OK. So that leaves 70% of our clubs that don't run lessons.

So how do they get new swimmers? They come from "other learn to swim programs." Yet coaches continually comment to us on how poorly prepared swimmers are when they come to their teams. Yes, likely they are.

After all, they are not being taught in programs run by professionals. Swim Coaches run the best learn to swim programs. Why? Go back to Steven Covey's principles "begin with the end in mind." Professional Coaches see great swimming every day. They know what it looks like. When they run lesson programs, they know what they want the end product to look like, so they work towards that. Your ordinary garden variety learn to swim teacher not with a swim team, may see good swimming once or twice a year on TV. (if that.) This is the principle on which the ASCA formed SwimAmerica…professional coaches teaching America's children to swim, for their safety, their health and their fun…in joining a swim team. The added bonus of course is that in all the world except the USA, swim team programs are financially supported by swim lessons. Only here do we try to make swim club finances work on swim team dues. Swim lessons create your revenue base and your client base.

Need in Search of a Solution? Part of the "franchise" of every club with a USA Swimming name on it, needs to be a SwimAmerica Learn to Swim program or similar. Good for the sport, good for financial operation of clubs. And it creates both new swimmers and new coaches from the ranks of the SwimAmerica coaches in learn to swim.

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