I don’t often make predictions because making predictions is foolish. No one knows how things are going to turn out. Conversely, very few people will go back and check to see if your predictions are wrong, but if you occasionally get a very big one right and enough people notice you get awesome powers of foresight projected on you.
So here goes.
I think that USA Swimming will cease to exist within the near future. The reasons why can be found by pouring over any number of things I’ve written over the past decade plus. But, in case you don’t want to pour over my poorly organized collection of writing, here’s a brief summary of why I think this:
They have failed to deal with the existential threat of abuse in the sport, and each time they have tried to fight it they have bought short term stability at the risk of long term survival (I’ll explain each of these in more detail)
Their business model is deeply threatened by Covid-19 and I have yet to see any evidence that they have the agility as an organization to course correct in time.
Bob Allard et al seem to be two to three steps ahead of them in a legal game of chess. In particular, favorite punching bag-of-the-blog, the SLAPP-master himself, Mark Schubert, could topple the entire organization if he gets sufficiently backed in to a corner.
Now, I’m not foolish enough to think that we can simply exist without an NGB altogether. When USA Swimming crumbles, a new governing body will rise in its place. If we’re not prepared, it will reform in the same shape as the old NGB, and that would obviously be bad. It will, however, inevitably have some personnel and values from the old organization. We need to be thoughtful about who and what they are so we preserve the right parts.
The Threat
There’s a story where USA Swimming doesn’t have to go down in flames, but venerated “leader” Chuck Wielgus long since set a course that the organization seems unable to steer away from, even with new leadership.
Curiously enough, if you go back to what was many people in the sports “spiritual awakening” to what was going on, Wielgus’ appearance in a 20/20 interview, Wielgus actually knew that abuse was an existential threat. He said as much to a gathering of “swimming people” way back in 2009
Wielgus could have engineered a mini-reckoning. USA Swimming could have admitted that it had mishandled complaints of abuse in the past, paid damages to victims, established an actual functional system for receiving future complaints and disciplining coaches, and moved on.
It would have been immensely painful and unpopular within the organization at the time. It would not, however, have ended USA Swimming, and it would have validated everything the organization claimed afterwards about their “leadership” on the issue.
Instead, Wielgus chose to stay popular with his troops (at least in the short term) and fight. He established a completely phony system for receiving future complaints, He went into hiding from almost all media. USA Swimming engaged in bitter fights with victims in court, which they steadily and painfully lost.
Boom Years
Another part of the reason Wielgus did not do this is because it was the boom years within the organization. Wielgus was exceedingly overcompensated, drawing a salary of a million dollars for a job that could easily be performed by someone who made 1/3 of that. The top executives at USA Swimming, the “leadership team” were also able to grow their compensation to well beyond the high end for the sport.
So why stop the party to deal with a serious problem? They also continued to ride the wave of popularity that Michael Phelps brought to the sport. Finally, they keyed in on a strategy for making money in a sport that has consistently failed to draw revenue from actual fandom or TV rights.
What they came up with almost looks comically designed in our current, Covid, era. They kept time standards for big meets just right so that the meets were always overly large. National and Junior National meets with 1000+ swimmers became the norm. Trials, the crown jewel of USA Swimming moneymaking, so appealing that even I am dying to go, ballooned to 2000.
Right now, tell me if you have heard anything about adjusting Olympic Trials for next summer. I’ll wait
So the plan is to have a 2000 competitors, plus 14,000 in the stands INSIDE for Olympic Trials? Now I guarantee after I post this blog, someone from USA Swimming will contact me and ask to go off the record and say they are actually thinking about maybe planning something else.
If you recall, the site for Olympic Trials was selected several years ago. We are talking about an event years in the planning- if there’s a plan B an agile organization would already have communicated a framework for it. But USA Swimming is not an agile organization.
Right now, USA Swimming is shedding staff (some of it’s best, to boot) to cut costs. The real pain will come when they continue to be unable to hold their mega meets through the winter and spring, most of which were planned for indoors in venues that struggle to maintain decent air quality as is. Does that sound like a stable platform to rest on?
Outmaneuvered
Attorney Bob Allard has essentially employed himself as USA Swimming’s oversight arm. He will continue to do so as long as they continue to resist meaningful reform and oversight. The more I thought about Allard’s recent big lawsuits, the more it seemed that Allard had actually learned enough that he is fighting a war while USA Swimming continued to only fight the individual battles (and lose).
I think we’re at the point where both sides know that there is actually enough incidences where coaches were able to abuse athletes (and other coaches) for this to go on forever. I truly believe that Allard (and others) could spend an entire career just ripping Her Majesty’s USA Swimming apart plank by plank.
The problem is now that were USA Swimming to do what it should have done a decade ago would probably mean the end of the organization. Essentially, I see their choices as fall apart now, or fall apart in a couple of years. So naturally, they’re shooting for a couple of years from now and spending a lot of time convincing themselves that a couple of years from now will never come.
One thing they have relied on is that even after 2010, there was little appetite for big change in USA Swimming. They could easily cast critics as outside of the norm. This was why Mike Unger, who made $500k in 2019, essentially gave me the “Blue Lives Matter” response before it existed. He was hoping he could gaslight his way through this.
That’s becoming increasingly untenable, and will only grow more so as the entire model we’re doing the sport under in the US suffers through dramatic change.
However, Mark Schubert could, in my opinion, greatly accelerate any timeline. Schubert’s modus operandi throughout his career has been to collect blackmail on others to use in case of self preservation. We have two major examples:
Sean Hutchison
Bill Jewell
I don’t think these are the only two instances. In each, Schubert only admitted what he knew in order to avoid consequences for himself. How many times has he done this without us hearing about it? It’s possible that he has a mountain of secrets big enough to topple the whole pile.
So it’s time to start planning for new governance. I’ll deign for the moment of naming names of who I think should persist since my mention is probably the kiss of death for anyone at USA Swimming. We’ll have a chance to replace the organization with one that doesn’t just look at the issue of abuse and correct the system reasons why it flourishes, but actually takes a proactive look at the well-being of everyone involved in the sport.
What if swimming actually lived up to its best self- a sport that teaches hard work, mental and physical health. What if it was actually a sport that values education, science and life outside sport. What if we had an equitable sport that was more than accessible and actually welcoming and representative the diverse population of America?
What if…