Last week, six women announced they were suing USA Swimming. Alongside the suit came a request by the attorney representing the women, Robert Allard, to once again do some housecleaning of employees that enabled their abuse.
The last, similar request came in the form of USA Swimming parting ways with two of its most problematic employees: Pat Hogan and Susan Woessner. So far there has been no action from USA Swimming, which has struggled organizationally to respond over the past few months to rapidly changing events.
Make no doubt about my position here. Debra Grodensky, Suzette Moran, Tracy Palmero and three other anonymous women deserve their day in court. They deserve to have their stories heard and ultimately I think they deserve restitution for what has been done to them and USA Swimming’s complicity in their abuse.
Lawsuits like these remain the only effective way to enact any kind of reform at USA Swimming, and so for that reason I think they are doubly important. As long as USA Swimming exists and governs most of American swimming, I’m going to push for reform.
I also don’t think that the organization can effectively reform into one that adequately prevents abusive behavior, sexual or otherwise. The same goes for their overlords at the USOPC. Both organizations have talented, smart and highly ethical people working in them. They have greatly expanded their policies over the last ten years. But increasingly I believe that what they have done is not even close to enough.
The fundamental problem, as I see it, lies within the foundation of each organization. What is the ultimate purpose of USA Swimming?
Is it to provide leadership and an ethical framework for coaching swimming? No.
Is it to ensure a great experience for all its members as they participate in the sport of swimming? No.
Is it to win as many medals at the Olympics as possible? You bet.
So let me walk you down the path of what that overarching goal means. Winning at the highest level in isolation doesn’t seem like a bad goal. Competition comes naturally to us, especially in America, and we strive to be the best in the world in many things.
Results before process
Right now, if I was so inclined, I could construct a super cut of coaches saying some variation of the following that you could watch for the rest of your life:
“Focus on the process, not the result”
But that is not what we do in American swimming. From the top down, there is a focus on getting results. Let’s take a look at USA Swimming’s mission statement from 2016, one which was “reformed”:
Part 1: Build the Base. USA Swimming’s membership is declining, so we are not building the base. Building the base is a result.
Part 2: Promote the Sport: Blah blah more money for USA Swimming and the USA Swimming Foundation. Money is a result. Also, USA Swimming is losing money.
Part 3: Competitive Success. Unlike the other two, American swimming undeniably the most competitively successful national swimming team in the world. Like the above three, this is a result.
Cart Before the Horse Goal Setting
Traditionally, goal setting has been about setting a concrete, measurable goal and then planning your process for how to get there. I don’t disagree that it is important to know what you’re going for or even to measure progress to it.
But if most coaches agree that the process is far more important than the result, why is the process an afterthought of goal setting?
I think that for all the result orientation these big organizations have, they don’t really impact our results at the biggest meets. I think if USA Swimming went belly up tomorrow, that we would still be the top swimming country in the world.
Just look at South Africa, with a federation so comically corrupt that at one point they couldn’t hold their National Championships because the water was completely unsafe for competition. And yet, the country consistently has high performing swimmers at the International level.
Even someone like Bob Bowman, I am almost 100% certain, is a better coach right now than when Micheal Phelps first burst onto the scene. But he will get less and less attention over time even as his actual process improves, less opportunities. Why? Because he will never coach a swimmer that will match the results dominance of Michael Phelps again.
Coaching Is All About Results
Now to be fair, I don’t mean to say that when I coach that it is all about results, or that even a majority of coaches value results above all else. What I do mean is that results are king when it comes to advancement in coaching.
What gets you that better club job? At least one outstanding athlete at your previous stop. Literally, you can be judged on your best possible result even though nobody would say they want to hire someone who (maybe?) did a good job with one athlete.
Even if such a narrow focus not be applied, the most tangible thing you can present to a new team, the “objective” facts about how good you are, are typically results based.
Likewise, nearly everyone works backwards to discover processes. They look for places with good results (in the past) and then try to figure out what process was used to get there. Typically if the results are good, then the process is also judged “good”. That is where the danger lies.
I think abuse is endemic to the system because it “works”, at least in the short-term and at large scale, to get results. If the big goal is to get impressive results, you can get an easy shortcut by doing the following:
Make your team as large as possible (# of athletes)
Push many athletes past their breaking point, or as many call it “eggs against the wall” training
Elevate those who survive while tying it to your methods
Do whatever you want because your ends justify your means
I don’t mean to make it sound like a majority, or even a sizable minority, of coaches are abusive. They are not. If I had to guess, it would be something on the scale of 5-10% who should not be working with kids whatsoever. And that is WAY WAY WAY too high.
Access to the Mothership
Which brings me back to USA Swimming. Let’s say that you’ve climbed the shortcut ladder and have a high performing athlete in your team. You can expect a whole new level of service to kick in at USA Swimming. You will get opportunities to come out to Colorado, consultants, the alchemy of Russel Mark, and more.
The same coach without the athlete barely experiences “service” from USA Swimming. They send plenty of money and get nearly nothing in return, except for maybe another “educational” course.
Better yet, you might even find yourself with a cushy job at the Mothership. That’s how Pat Hogan ended up there. It’s crazy for me to repeat this because I didn’t see it at the time, but Susan Woessner was a fresh out of school social worker with little to no work experience when she was hired to “protect” athletes across a 300k+ membership organization. Want to bet there were more qualified people that might have done the job a bit better?
Listen, let me repeat this. There are great people that work at USA Swimming, and at the USOPC. I have a friend who works at USA Swimming in a very high place! I just think that right now, if you want to abuse children, the sport of swimming is still a great opportunity for you. The culture, despite all the policies and education, remains firmly rooted in place. Results are what matters, not how you achieve it.
Until we build an organization with that as its foundation we are doomed to repeat.