Picture that you have been suddenly transported to an alternative universe in which none of the swimmers enjoys competition. You find yourself the president of an organization sort of like USMS and have been put in charge of designing programs for swimmers who aren't at all interested in racing but who enjoy swimming and have a desire to improve. What do you think an organization like USMS would look like under such a scenario?
A couple of things have been suggested to me:
Think of swim clinics like TI offers but based on a largely volunteer basis like USMS is instead of having an entrepreneurial basis. Instead of going to meets to race swimmers would be going to clinics to learn, and yes, test their progress.
Consider the number of person-hours needed to organize a swim meet, just in terms of officials. A tremendous amount of effort is put into ensuring a "fair race" and that times swum at one meet can fairly be compared to times swum at another. If you were able to get the same number of people to volunteer the same number of hours and undergo the same level of training aimed in a more instructional vein what could you accomplish? It seems to me that you could organize really great clinics, that non-competitive swimmers would benefit from a lot more than swimming in a meet and perhaps still obtain a similar social experience.
Would it be possible to produce tools for evaluating swimmers progress that would be more informative than just time in a race? For example could one use stroke checklists to give more feedback on technique? Could you develop standardized evaluation tools that, for example, used inexpensive video equipment to do a detailed analysis of a swim, including all the stuff currently used for analysis of elite swimmers such as reaction time, distance under water, time to 15m, stroke count and turnover, turn time, etc..
I suspect that there is a lot of great stuff being done at larger more established clubs that have really good coaches that could be captured and documented and codified and used in the many clubs that are currently struggling to find a good coach in their area that they can afford.
What can you envision?
Parents
Former Member
Masters Swimming Canada has a new website, MyMSC.ca where swimmers can enter the metres swum each workout and be recognized with certificates and swim caps and such as they reach various distance milestones in a program called the Million Metre Challenge. It will summarize your monthly totals and you can look at a calendar view with a graphical representation of your daily training. It has been quite popular, over a thousand people having participated. The site also allows you to record your running and cycling workouts, and you can record your times in all the events, official or unofficial. On the competitive side you can look up all your meet results and see how you rank nationally or by province, and it will automatically list any national records you hold and provincial records for some provinces. The plan is to add a lot more functionality for tracking training and improvement (time for 1km, "golf scores", etc.).
Masters Swimming Canada has a new website, MyMSC.ca where swimmers can enter the metres swum each workout and be recognized with certificates and swim caps and such as they reach various distance milestones in a program called the Million Metre Challenge. It will summarize your monthly totals and you can look at a calendar view with a graphical representation of your daily training. It has been quite popular, over a thousand people having participated. The site also allows you to record your running and cycling workouts, and you can record your times in all the events, official or unofficial. On the competitive side you can look up all your meet results and see how you rank nationally or by province, and it will automatically list any national records you hold and provincial records for some provinces. The plan is to add a lot more functionality for tracking training and improvement (time for 1km, "golf scores", etc.).
