In June of 2009, I had made it to the big leagues. Or so I thought. After two years of mostly unpaid labor at the University of Pennsylvania, I had secured a job at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
I didn’t have a place to live, I knew less than a handful of people, but I was thrilled. A year before I would have put my chances of getting a coaching position in a power conference at virtually nothing. So, I cut myself a little slack for what I was doing: working for free.
Now, I did spend some time fulfilling the duties that were in my contract. I recruited, I ordered sweatshirts, sent them back when they misspelled the word “swimming”, and filed all my paperwork.
But all of the coaching that I was doing, essentially, was for free. I went to the US Open for the first time in my life, a fact which I mostly tried to suppress. My boss was mostly not at practice that summer, owing to the fact that she had committed to coach a local summer team, something she was actually getting paid for.
For the next three summers, I did much the same. The collegiate season that I was contracted to coach within ended, and I kept coaching for “Buzz” and didn’t get paid. Being a coaching junkie in his mid-20s, I was pretty happy with this arrangement. After all, I wanted to keep coaching, and I was competitive. Continuing to work with swimmers year round was a matter of fact for keeping competitive at that level.
I bring this up because of the many unforeseen circumstances coronavirus has given us, it may disrupt this rhythm as well. In fact, I hope it does.
Plain Economics
Before I get into the squishier parts of this, let me explain why I think the economics of this are just wrong for nearly everyone involved. First, lots of college coaches that do this are not getting paid very well in the first place for the job they actually have. So doing extra work for nothing is pretty silly.
But if we look beyond the college coaches themselves, they also put an economic strain on club programs whose business model is built around charging people money for coaching. Why would you pay for a comparable product when you can get it for free?
Now, many club programs have traditionally not charged older, college aged swimmers to train with them. I expect that very few of those are continuing that practice in an era where pool space is often limited by social distancing measures. With lots of swim clubs sitting on the precipice of economic failure, there’s no reason for them to give away free stuff.
Finally, even the athletes who are getting something for “free” are, I believe, ultimately hurt by this. Things always have a cost, and I think that athletes are paying the cost in the quality of coaching that they are receiving when it is delivered by “free”, underpaid labor.
Finally, these “voluntary” workouts can often be anything but and ultimately subvert the NCAA rules that were designed with the intent of preventing undue pressure on athletes outside of their defined “season”.
Now, this is usually the part where I get asked “what do you want instead?”. Sometimes I answer that question, and today is one of those days. Let me get out my brush and paint Utopia for you.
CUT THAT CHECK!
This coming year, I’d like to see coaches come together. I’d like college coaches to coach their college teams, and then when their not contracted to do so, I’d like a club that charges money to provide coaching to be there to pick up where they left off.
I’d like college coaches to not feel pressure to coach year round, and I’d like athletes to also be choosing whether to do so.
I’d like us all to talk to each other a bit more, and trust each other. I’ll admit that when I was a college coach, i could be a bit of a smug asshole about how good I was and often looked down on club coaches. I’d like to think that now I’ve evolved from smug asshole to smarmy know-it-all.
And in the words of Rocky Balboa:
If I can change, and you can change, everybody can change.