The future of Men's Swimming in the US

1. Boring "Just for fun" is correct. The sport is boring unless you know someone in the pool competing or do it yourself. A famous SMU womens swimmer once said....... "The only people who care about swimming are swimmers." Meets are a nightmare for parents in general. 3 day events morning, noon and night will scare off even the veterans at times. Then again, Bob Costas talks like an idiot when it comes to swimming. 2. Expense Yes, it is moderately expensive but it is NOTHING compared to some sports. Hockey is a complete joke in terms of high cost. Swimming never was a lower class sport. To this day you still don't see that much minority or lower income participants. It's still largely a white middle class sport. There should be enough money out there to fork out for this sport in comparison to the big 3 relatively speaking. 3. Hard Work Damn straight. Swimming is one of the hardest aerobic sports out there..... and yes... I would even pit it against the hours and efforts that triathletes log. It requires absolute and total comittment and frequently mentally burns out kids by the age of 18. Good coaching can help prevent this burnout factor and create a better environment to crank serious yardage. However, I see so many fat kids in my neighborhood today. It really depresses me. I blame the parents. I honestly think Americans are more lazy every generation and this is part of the problem. This one is a hard hurdle to get buy for the sport of swimming. 4. Money and Success Swimming truly sucks in terms of financial rewards compared to the Big Three. Let's face it, we are a culture of greed and our kids follow suit (no pun intended). Why would a talented athlete at a young age want to make a few million like Phelps when he can make tens of millions like the Big 3 and tennnis?...... Hell... even golf is superior in terms of financial rewards over time. This is a real image problem to overcome when vying for talent of these kids early on. 5. No National Marketing in comparison Who the hell cares about swimming other than on an Olympic year when we are counting medals and swimming saves our ass at every summer games. There must be a better way to rope in bigger dollars and sponsors for national network TV campaigns to grow the sport each year. You can't just have one meet a year like Duel in the Pool and expect to compete with the Big 3. It's got to be huge and pervasive. Big money...... how does US Swimming get a hold of people with Big Money. I'm telling yah this sport needs a major marketing booster shot to keep it going strong in the future. John Smith

Perhaps, since GoodSmith is so adept at starting blazing threads (and standing back & laughing some of the time), we have just the person for USS to hire to attract attention to the sport. Of course Tall Paul would say it would probably be just the wrong kind of attention...

What John is saying is spot on. We are horrible at marketing this sport. I am also one who is amazed that US Swimming has never run a capital campaign to raise money for promotion of the sport. The question is, once the money is raised, how do you go about promoting it? I think for one thing, we can follow Golf's example. In the past 15 years golf has become one of the most popular sports and is immensly more popular among kids and adults than tennis is. I think we can all remember in the 70's and 80's how tennis was more popular. A superstar like a Phelps could definitely be promoted like Tiger has been the past 10 years. Tiger has helped take golf to a wider, more diverse audience. Yes, we have to train a lot more and I know Phelps has been taken away from training since 2004, but I know something could be done with our superstars to promote the sport to an uninformed public. As a parent myself, I would love for my kids to learn WHY these people are so successful. Hard work, VO2 Max development (I couldn't resist), discipline, mental toughness, and dedication are lessons I want my children to learn. You can't put a price tag on that. Yes, we would love more TV time, but as it has been said many times before, swimming is boring to most people. Golf was also about 15 years ago, now we have a TV station dedicated totally to golf. I play golf and I think the Golf Channel is pretty boring myself! This needs to be a grassroots effort to communicate to kids and parents alike the benefits of swimming for life. We are never going to win the money game. If you want to make meets more exciting, follow the sumer league model. In Phoenix, my kids swim in the Country Club league (they are too young for USS). The meets are on Wednesday night, the kids have a ball and the parents have much social interaction. Amazingly enough, they even serve alcohol to the parents there, so it's kind of like a big party! A dual meet format such as this with local clubs, schools, etc. really seems to get all people involved. One last thing. It has been said that swimming is great because you get to train with the girls. I totally disagree with this. Tell me if it considered "macho" among teens for boys and girls to do the same workouts. They don't do it in any other sport. Can you imagine how a co-ed basketball practice might be thought of? I think an all-male swim team looks much tougher, perception wise, and boys will be allowed to be boys more than they could in a co-ed practice. I am not sexist, please understand. I just think teen age boys have an opinion that it is considered more macho not to have girls in the practice. Just my two cents worth...

My "Evil Twin" is very good at identifying controversial and in this case appropriate themes to get peoples attention....as is the case with this post. Problem is he, along with most others responding have been good at only pointing out the obviouse problems.....not the much hardr solutions! I will first and foremost challenge anyone reading this thread to share with the group how many phone calls, emails, letters, etc. they have personally sent to the local media asking them to step up coverage of our sport?! Next, how about some specific point by point plans on how we should market our sport? Last but not least.....forget about golf...look at the X games and how volleyball adapted their rules to make their sport "tv friendly".

Originally posted by Paul Smith My "Evil Twin" is very good at identifying controversial and in this case appropriate themes to get peoples attention....as is the case with this post. Problem is he, along with most others responding have been good at only pointing out the obviouse problems.....not the much hardr solutions! I will first and foremost challenge anyone reading this thread to share with the group how many phone calls, emails, letters, etc. they have personally sent to the local media asking them to step up coverage of our sport?! Next, how about some specific point by point plans on how we should market our sport? Last but not least.....forget about golf...look at the X games and how volleyball adapted their rules to make their sport "tv friendly". Actually our swim club(our because I am on the team's board) has made a concentrated effort to get good relationships with the media. This summer we had meet results and blurbs about our local swimmers in the paper every week. We had quite a few pictures and 3 times our swimmers were featured athletes of the week. We keep the media push on, because if we don't they will forget us, because in a Big 10 town, coverage goes to football and basketball. I think that swim clubs need to give good value for the money spent and the team will grow and kids will come to it. One of the major obstacles our team has is pool space and how expensive it is. The u of I wants to charge us 50 per hour for practice time, other places are cheaper, but the practice times are not practical for kids. Practicing until 10pm on a school night, many from small town that they have to drive to afterwards. It is not a good situation for attracting swimmers. If I manage to talk a prospective parent past the money part(it is worth it, blah, blah, blah), the fact that their 9 year old will be practicing until 9pm at night usually turns them right off. And the fact that the 9 year old probably should attend practice at least 3 times a week, maybe more, and mom and dad are constantly on the road driving to practice. So to make swimming more attractive, something has to be done about pool time availabilty, and cost of the sport. Parents prefer a sport that is close, that the child can get themselves to by bike. Kids prefer a sport that has their friends from school in, and that allows them to sleep in in the summer. Unless some of these things change, you will be fighting an uphill battle. Still there is always those little fishes out there that are having a grand time in summer rec(a place I always recommend newbie parents to start their kids out at). If they have a positive experience in a win/win atmosphere like that, then they are more likely to continue.

I am down with a lot of the comments here. Yes, we could do a lot more to market this sport and make it more fan friendly, but we have done a number of good things already. Here are some more specific comments, in no particular order: - You clearly can make TV coverage of a swim meet compelling viewing, with good editing and production. We do it every four years at the Olympics. Yes, an all day marathon of a YMCA age group meet is a snoozer for vitually everyone, BUT for an important national or international meet, you don't have to show every minute of every heat on TV. - You can pump up interest in swimming competition by using non-standard formats, like head to head duels, focusing on short sprint races, etc. etc. I wholeheartedly endorse adding these kind of events to the mix. However, realize that some of this will come at the expense of running a "pure" competition that gives every swimmer an equal chance of swimming well and winning their events. I hear lots of shouting about making swim meets less boring. Well, the chance that a front runner might crack up and be eliminated from competition, through no fault of his or her own, is part of what generates interest in some sports. Think about the Tour de France, or the NCAA Basketball Tournament's "one & done" format (as compared to the NBA's endless, utterly predictable and unwatchable playoff system). Any time there is a suggestion that some swimmer got some infinitessimal advantage over another, an illegal dolphin kick at the turn, a pool 1 inch short of regulation length, the howls of protest are deafening. Are we prepared to accept a little random unfairness to make things more interesting? I am, but I have noticed others in this sport have turned fairness into a fetish. - You can make big money payouts for professionals a priority, and drum up publicity by showing more skin. How far do you want to go down that road? I am in favor of some movement in this direction, but before we start, we should talk about what parts of our sport we want to preserve, even if we lose sponsor dollars and TV ratings by sticking to them. I don't want swimming to turn into fear factor (or figure skating), where the contestants are selected more because they are physically attractive, and less because of their athletic ability. I don't want our very best swimmers to begin behaving like the worst examples of professional athletes in the big three. I don't want club level swimming to turn into the sleazy, child-eating monster that summer club league basketball has become. - Comparing swimming to golf, and suggesting we can do what golf did, is preposterous. Golf has ALWAYS been one of the most absurdly over-televised sports in the history of broadcast TV. Even in the 70s, when golf allegedly was smaller, what other sport would have events on TV, every weekend, for men's professional (PGA), women's professional (LPGA), and MASTERS (?!) profession (Senior PGA, for the love of Pete!) tours? Saying swimming should immitate golf is a bit like those methods for getting rich that tell you first you should inherit a million bucks. - There is no money in swimming compared to the major team sports. But, compared to swimming in the 70s, there is a ton of money. Now, you can count on two hands the number of wealthy professional swimmers. Back then, you could count them on one finger--Mark Spitz, maybe. - We have clearly lost participation rate and talent compared to earlier years. One reason why? The attenuation of the Mark Spitz effect, i.e. the age of swimmers old enough to have watched him compete in Munich and be inspired to try the sport. Look at the most populace age groups in any masters meets, esp. Nationals, and the presence of the Mark Spitz generation leaps out at you. - My personal two bits on the unpopularity of age group swimming: I think it boils down to time demands on the parents. Yes, it is not cheap, but other sports are more expensive. Yes, your chances of turning pro, or even getting a college scholarship, and miniscule, but I haven't heard many parents, and darn few sane parents, consider that as a major factor. The aforementioned endless meets, travel, and having to get the little munchskins to an ungodly number of workouts, often at inconvient hours, and often with the parents having to hang out for a couple of hours at the pool during practice, is simply a lot more of an imposition than even a heavy bill for club dues. - In a related point, I am not convinced that subjecting young age group swimmers to heavy workloads is the best way to make them faster swimmers in their late teens and early twenties. We like to assume that your chances of being nationally ranked at 18 are better if you are nationally ranked at 8, but does the latter cause or contribute to the former? How many nationally ranked 8 year olds are still there 10 years later? If my doubts are correct, we could do a lot more for the kids by making early age group swimming more about fun and participation, and less about beating everyone else. Fewer injuries, less cause for mental burn-out at in the teen years, more of a reason to want to stick with the sport. - Therefore, I like the idea of radically reformatting early age group swimming and meets. Why do we have all the age groups swim one event, then the next, etc. etc., and keep hundreds of people twiddling their thumbs for hours in between swims that last 1-10 minutes? Hell, why do we have all age groups at every meet, or so many meets? My ideas are not well formed on this subject; I don't have concrete proposals. But, I think if we challenged assumptions, we could reduce the thumb-twiddling factor, and the resulting boredom problem. - I do think we can turn swimming into a popular spectator sport. The Aussies do it in the face of competition from crickett and rugby. So can we. Matt

You are right that there is no national campaign for getting involved in swimming like they do for other sports.

Comparing swimming to golf, and suggesting we can do what golf did, is preposterous. Golf has ALWAYS been one of the most absurdly over-televised sports in the history of broadcast TV. Even in the 70s, when golf allegedly was smaller, what other sport would have events on TV, every weekend, for men's professional (PGA), women's professional (LPGA), and MASTERS (?!) profession (Senior PGA, for the love of Pete!) tours? Saying swimming should immitate golf is a bit like those methods for getting rich that tell you first you should inherit a million bucks. I did NOT compare golf to swimming, and to say that it is "preposterous" is true. WHAT I SAID is that we could follow their model to make the sport more popular to more people. It has always been televised but has become more popular because they have used people like Tiger Woods to appeal to a wider audience. We could do the same. We have not always had every weekend covered for golf and no the LPGA and Senior Tours have not always been on. Only since golf has gained greater popularity in the last 10 years has this been the case. Please read what I say before you make a comment like that.

Last but not least.....forget about golf...look at the X games and how volleyball adapted their rules to make their sport "tv friendly". Great point about the X Games they have done a great job of appealing to a younger audience. I just think a lot of that has to do with the "danger" of the sport. Until we introduce a half pipe swimming event we have to figure out something else. The reason I used golf as my example is due to the fact that golf has always been considered a Country Club sport as swimming is sometimes thought by uninformed people. Think back to the Nike Ad and the quote "I am Tiger Woods", if any of you remember that, it was pure genius. The message was any one could golf and the sport was open to many people. There is no danger or extreme actions in Golf as in swimming and they have not used sex to make it more appealing. If that is the denominator we need to go to as some have suggested, I for one think that cheapens what we do.

Originally posted by knelson Actually I've always thought swimming was one of the cheaper sports. It certainly isn't gear intensive like a lot of other sports. I think one of swimming's problems is that it isn't a team sport. I think this is much more a factor than that there isn't money in it at the elite levels. I doubt most parents initially get there kids involved in a specific sport based on how much money the kid could end up making in it! I think USA Swimming should concentrate on how much fun it is to be part of a team. The sport will always be highly individual, but kids can have a lot of fun with their teammates. Swimming in Illinois has always been relatively expensive because lessons & pool time along wiht being a member makes it very expensive compared to other sports. Here in galesburg, to participate in soccer, peewee football and baseball, you don't have to pay any membership dues to the Y. During the summer age group is only about 4 weeks of 3 practices a day and it costs over $70. then you have ot get to meets. Here swimming is rather poplular. Our high school boys is the only sport that hasn't had a losing record for over five years. Unfortunately, most of the guys who swim are sons of doctors & lawyers. It used to be a very community oriented sport. But the high school coach started a summer team at the country clud and that really changed. The public rec team isn't as good as the other. In a town of 33,000 peoplewe have wo age group summer teams. I really think that the only way swimming is going to gain any real national attention is for it to be on tv. Remeber Wide World of Sports. It showed recorded swim meets very frequently. In a school promotion & society class I took, I learned that swimming used to be one of the most broadcasted college sports inthe early 60s. That has really changed becasue NCAA's ability to market football & basketball packages to networks.