USA Swimming Hiring Backwards

I don’t know if Brendan Hansen will be a good National Junior Team Director. His tenure at USA Swimming up to this point hasn’t made that clear. When he started, he seemed quite popular with membership. That sentiment has trended downwards, as it does for most people the longer they are in the employ of USA Swimming.

What does strike me as strange is that before this announcement USA Swimming had three crucial roles they were hiring for. One is the CEO, with Tim Hinchey’s long awaited sacking. Then there is the National Team Director who will oversee that entirety of the “wet” side of the operation. Finally there is the National Junior Team coach.

Sports organizations are often more hierarchical than your average corporation. So it strikes me as curious logic that USA Swimming would hire the most subordinate of these positions first. It would be as if a major college athletic department found themselves without an AD or coaches for their swim program, and started by hiring an assistant coach before a head coach or the AD.

Loyalty Pledge

That leaves nothing but pure speculation about why this hire was made. One thing for anyone to understand in any context is that getting a job often has little to do with how competent you are to do a job. It has almost everything to do with your relationship with the person hiring (and their ability to hire).

In this case, I don’t think it’s going too far to assume that Hansen has won over interim CEO Shana Ferguson. Likewise, an average interim CEO might not have had the juice to make this hire happen and would have been forced to hire “in order”. So it probably says something about how much Ferguson is trusted by the board in the “interim”.

I can’t find fault in Hansen’s pursuit of the job. Who wouldn’t want a promotion and a pay raise inside their company? Again, setting aside discussion of whether or not he is qualified to lead Junior swimming in the US, he has definitely established himself as a loyal soldier of USA Swimming. That was on full display during this summer’s Olympic trials, when he was pressed into extra duty as a poolside hype man through the competition.

name ID

I’ve written before about how generally prominent athletes seem to have a leg up on coaching positions. This is despite my contention that your athletic prowess has zero correlation with coaching ability. If anything the relationship is inverse in my opinion. Having an elite athletic career often relies on a completely different set of skills than being a good coach (or leader).

That doesn’t mean that elite athletes can’t be great coaches. But why are they hired? It would be easy to say that people take their prowess as a proxy for coaching chops. I think it is more indirect than that. Let me give you an example.

Perhaps I ask you to imagine yourself hiring for a coaching position. Now I offer up some resumes. One is Michael Phelps, and then among some other names is Tom Himes. If you’re from Maryland, no cheating. Now people really in the know may recognize Himes as one of Phelps’ age group coaches, and the current head coach of North Baltimore. But I guarantee you that if you polled even swim coaches nationwide, Phelps would have 99% name ID and Himes might be under 50%.

Athletes are simply just better known than the coaches who coach them. That’s because they do the actual competing and get the actual accolades. There are no gold medals in the Olympics for coaching. Take it from someone who maintains a niche popular podcast and blog within the swimming world- when people recognize their name they treat you differently, mostly for the better.

Why? Because they feel they already know you, on some level. They are more likely to want you to know them. And that matters when you’re trying to make a relationship to get hired.

Which is my longwinded way of explaining how exactly a multiple Olympic gold medalist has vaulted so far despite a pretty thin resume of actual coaching.

Next up, I expect USA Swimming to hire it’s National Team Director. Who knows when we’ll get a CEO, but they’ll just have to deal with the hand they’ve been dealt.