The Semi-Professionals Need Their Own Home

It's hard to believe that we are nearly a full year through another Olympic cycle, with Rio a fading memory and Tokyo seemingly approaching at breakneck pace. On the other hand, it's easy to believe when you look at the results of this week's  National Championships and World Trials. 

Team America is the Golden State Warriors of swimming, only if the team won some ridiculous total like 77-5 in Olympic years and then coasted to 60 win seasons the other three quarters of the time. 

The reasons for the slippage make sense. The process of making, then subsequently succeeding as a part of the US Team at the Olympics defies explanation. It is only natural that many of these athletes take some time away from the sport in the aftermath. 

Still it's worth to reflect, even when you're the best, or maybe especially when you're the best. Let's set aside the best from Rio: who are the swimmers that could best be pushing the ball forward in this off-Olympic year?

The answer is the post-graduates, the fifth (or sixth) years, the "semi-pro". There are a ton of capable athletes in this group. Relatively few seem to thrive. The answer is not in the 18 and under crowd, of whom there have been some really nice performances this week, and who deserve continued focus on their long term development.

Where are these athletes training? The opportunities for the most part still exist in some awkwardly grafted-on addition to a college or club team. This is not a successful formula for the group as a whole. 

The older a swimmer gets, the higher level they get to, the harder it gets to push their performance forward. However, the almost all of these "semi pros" exist in an environment where it would be amount to career suicide for their coaches to devote the big time resources to them that they need. College coaches are hired for college results. Club coaches are paid to coach the paying membership.

These swimmers need a true home, something that is actually designed for them, that gives them the resources that they need for elite performance. It is not USA Swimming's job to do this as top down solutions in this area are usually a mild to spectacular failure. 

I've heard a lot of dissatisfaction from the would be sponsors of these athletes. They do not feel they are getting value in return for there sponsorship. This kind of solution would be costly, and it is essential that we identify who is sitting on the sidelines, why they are doing so, and what would be valuable to them in return.

Ultimately, the development of a whole swath of capable swimmers could be a lot better. It will not be easy, but it is possible and, I believe, worth it.

Are you involved in sponsorship of swimming? Write me!

Why David Marsh Makes Perfect Sense At UC San Diego

I don't pretend to know David Marsh very well. I've met him a couple of times. But it appears there are many people out there who also don't know David Marsh very well weighing in with rumors about what he might do. A lot of those people were shocked to hear that he would take over as Head Coach of UC San Diego.

Marsh, who's coaching resume means that he has had his name floated for every "extra super high profile" coaching opening for what seems like over a decade, is probably not what a lot of people expected to take over a program transitioning from Division 2 to Division 1 swimming.

But Marsh to UC San Diego makes a ton of sense, and speaks to the changes in the landscape since Marsh left college coaching to incubate a pro group in Charlotte, North Carolina. Let's tick off some obvious reasons why this move makes sense

1. San Diego is by all accounts a lovely place to live. Beautiful weather year round. One of the trickiest aspects of building professional swimming is making places to have professional swimming attractive to adult athletes, while balancing that areas that are attractive to people in their 20s and 30s are often expensive.

But my guess is that San Diego will be a much better draw for professional swimming talent than Charlotte was, even if it appears that Charlotte will continue to have professional swimmers.

2. The Bob Bowman affect. There are only a few truly creative people in charge of hiring swim coaches in the college system. One such person is Ray Anderson of ASU, who went for broke to get Bob Bowman to cross the country and take over a struggling team. Bowman's instant success has essentially provided a model for what Marsh will be doing in San Diego. 

3. UC San Diego will see a talent boom in coaching. Likewise, San Diego will be an attractive destination for coaches, and now doubly attractive with David Marsh running the show. As I once said in a video, being a head coach of a combined program is far more about managerial skill than coaching skill. 

David Marsh is perhaps swimming's top manager. He has figured out how to scale his own coaching ability by finding great coaches to work for him and putting them in positions to be really successful. A great example from the very successful Charlotte training group was that he had Bob Groseth, a vastly overqualified assistant coach, roaming the pool deck with him. 

You can expect UC San Diego to be an even better platform for Marsh to put coaches in strong positions to be successful and find a way to create positively imbalanced situations like Groseth's.

It will be exciting to see what happens in the next few years in NCAA Division 1 Swimming, as there are for the first time in my memory five or more teams who are honestly pulling out all the stops to win a NCAA Championship.

Want creative ideas on hiring to make your team better? Write me!

Aerobic Base is A Myth

It's amazing that in 2017 people still believe in aerobic base. Although, I guess when you compare this to people believing the earth is flat, the belief that you can magically hold on to a training effect for months or even years of de-training sounds fairly innocent.

Witness this interview from the most likable person in swimming, Elizabeth Beisel:

Beisel returned from months away and can still swim a pretty slick 400 IM. She credits the "base" of her training from years of high volume work with both Chuck Batchelor of Attleboro Bluefish and Gregg Troy at Florida for her continued ability to put up solid times in an endurance event.

All credit due to both men, who coached Beisel to a long stretch of outstanding, world class swimming. I have never met Troy, but I have met Chuck Batchelor. He is a wonderful guy who has done a lot to raise the standard of what was quite a depressing LSC prior to his arrival.

But Beisel's claims are very tame when it comes to some of the whoppers I've heard about aerobic base. I've heard at various times over the years how a strong "base" was key to Tom Jager's 50 freestyle performances in the 1980s, or basically any older swimmer that hardly trains and can still reproduce best times or near best times.

When I myself produced a best time in a 100 training three times a week and roughly 1000 yards a practice (at age 27), many people told me it must be due to my "base" even though it had been five years since I had done anything that was then considered "aerobic" training in swimming

To me, these performances say far more about how far we have yet to get with the sophistication of swim training systems. The fact that there is such a relatively small dip in performance from an athlete like Beisel, or any number of post-collegiate athletes after months of de-training indicates to me that the training is not making as big of a difference as we would like. 

I don't believe in magic, and I don't believe in training adaptations that last forever. As far as we've come in swimming, there is an incredible level of performance waiting for us in the future if we embrace how primitive the methods we have for improving swimmers are right now. 

Do you want to try and swim faster, practicing less time than you do now? Write me

Professional Swimming Starts From the Ground Up

Let me first say that Katinka Hosszu is absolutely right. Swimming is not a professional sport. Although she herself has been able to make a profession out of it through pure prize money, and yet others have strung together enough sponsorships to stay afloat, there is nothing resembling what we consider a true professional class in swimming.

She is right to rail against FINA, which is absolutely corrupt to the core and disinterested in creating a professional sport. Likewise, we should not look to the governing bodies, who invest far more heavily in non-swimming personnel than directly funding athletes. She is right to say that "it has always been right in front of us"

Swimming is a sport where sizable amounts of money changes hands, but surprisingly very little of it gets into the pockets of the people who add the most value to the sport. The bureaucracies we have in place are designed to enrich a select few, and leave the rest fighting each other over scraps.

It's not surprising that some swimmers whined and complained for the rule changes to World Cups that hurt someone like Hosszu. They are fighting for the survival of their meager professional careers. Two things are obvious:

A swimmer of Hosszu's stature should not have to compete for prize money to make a living in the first place. She is right to be firing off at the power players in Hungarian Swimming, who have had little to do with her success but nevertheless are enriched for it while she hustles every weekend.

When I coached in Denmark, Lotte Friis, the woman who almost beat Ledecky, was barely able to sustain her swimming career to the 2016 Olympics. I helped to broker a meager sponsorship through a private donor to help her continue to train and prepare. What did we get in exchange? We got our club represented by one of the most selfless, wonderful athletes our sport has ever seen. 

Many were critical. "What a waste of money" they said. I couldn't disagree more. We should all, from the ground up, be looking for ways to support the elite athletes of our support to a manageable level. My only regret was that we weren't able to find a way to support Lotte more. Only then will we see more athletes with the security to put on a show the way Hosszu has done for so many years.

Only when we make it inevitable from the very bottom of swimming's bureaucracy do we have a chance of breaking the stranglehold of corruption that holds all of us down. We cannot wait for federations, or USA Swimming, or FINA or (ugh) ASCA.

Athletes may form a union, but that union will be useless unless the rest of us, the rank and file of the swimming world, rally behind them wherever we can. We need to see supporting the top level of swimming as valuable to every level below it, not as some petty waste of resources.

The Power of Crying In Sports

Two weeks after my daughter was born I found myself a blubbering mess. I was watching the Star Trek movie (the 2009 reboot). The opening scene has James Kirk's father sacrificing himself so that his wife (who is in labor) and crew can escape certain death. He lives to hear the first sounds of his son but never sees him.

In that moment I was heartbroken for a movie character. However silly it might have been, the catharsis was real. Like most men, especially athletes and coaches, crying was not something I did often. It was much later that I realized how weak that made me. 

A League of Our Own

Sports suffers from a hyper masculinity complex. To reference another movie, Tom Hanks said "there's no crying in baseball", but he was absolutely wrong. There should be plenty of crying in baseball.

Think about what crying actually is: a raw display of emotion. Sometimes we cry when we are sad, or feeling great joy or love. But crying is just a physical display of the emotions we are feeling. 

We cannot control our emotions, but we can control our reaction to emotions. So many of us, especially men in sports, have learned that despite the sadness, joy or love we might feel in a moment it is bad and weak for us to wear that emotion so visibly.

Worse yet, as coaches we can often struggle to deal with athletes who cry when they are in a heightened emotional state. I have often heard coaches mutter about athletes crying, especially around big competitions. 

The truth is, at least athletes who can release their emotions in this way are in touch with how they are feeling. Yes, crying can cross over and be "too much", but I find more often than not, it is over-suppressed in sports. 

Coaches should be working on emotional skills with their athletes rather than shunning tears. That means bringing some of our less in touch athletes out of their shell. It also means that we need to build a runway for emotional athletes to land their plane safely.

Sports should not be an arena for emotional suppression, rather it should be a healthy place where we learn to harness powerful emotions for the good of ourselves and those around us.

Want to learn more about getting athletes out of their shell or safely landing the plane? Write me. 

We're Doing Board Run Teams Wrong

Over the weekend, the news came out from back in Denmark. Sigma, the perennial "best" or almost best club in the country, was breaking up into two. Why? Well, put simply, because the (parent) boards of both teams simply couldn't get along.

In America, the conventional wisdom is that coach run/owned teams are a better competitive model than board run teams. It's true that many coaches prefer this model, especially because of the volatile nature of board run clubs. The situation is much the same in Denmark, where not one of the major Copenhagen area clubs has the same head coach that they had when I moved there a little over four years ago.

But coach run teams have their own problems too. I'm personally uncomfortable with the lack of oversight that many coach run programs exhibit. Coaches need checks and balances just like anyone else, and they need productive ones.

Enter the board. Here's the problem with almost any board I've ever heard of in swimming: It is made up mostly of parents of swimmers on the team. The inherent conflict of interest is the root of most problems on teams with boards. It's an impossible expectation to put on parents to set aside the interest of their own child or children when serving as a volunteer leader for a team.

I feel for the parents who serve on team boards. Their hearts are in the right place, and often times they are filling a role that no one else will even step up and do. 

So who should serve on the board? There is actually a more important question to answer first. How do we get people other than parents interested in serving on the boards of club swimming teams? I don't pretend to have all the answers to how to do so.

A good start would mean identifying people with strengths outside of the the typical "parent" group who would be able to contribute something to the board. They could be local business people, former athletes, educators. Then ask them some questions: what would it take to get them interested in serving on the board? What would they value in return for contributing to running a team?

I can promise this: the process alone of attracting new talent outside of parents to team boards would give you a huge competitive advantage.

Want to learn more about how to structure your team? Write me

Mad Scientist Ray Looze Shoots for the Moon

Let me preface everything I'm about to say with this: I do not know Ray Looze. My impression of him is mainly formed from pool deck gossip and fifteen or so years of following the Indiana University Swimming and Diving team from afar.

I started nerding out about Indiana in the early 2000s, when a star of my local club scene went to swim there. It was an eye opener for me. I felt like a real country bumpkin watching our local hero miss the conference team and compete in a last chance meet instead. Furthermore, I recall them having a guy (named Murph Halasz, I think) who went 1:46 in the 200 fly, and that was not fast enough to qualify for NCAAs. 

I couldn't believe it. It was my first introduction into how crazy fast NCAA swimming is and was. In the subsequent years, Indiana remained a fascinating program for me. I remember how impossibly fast Colin Russell seemed, and then the drama that ensued when Colin Russell got ushered out of NCAA swimming.

The Russell saga established Looze' reputation as someone who pushed the boundaries. Indiana remained an always solid national presence, often derided by other coaches for exceptional recruiting classes and somewhat less exceptional results.

As I wrote about earlier, all of that changed when Looze shocked the college swimming world by managing to recruit former heated rival Dennis Dale over to his staff a few years ago. Now he's made two stunning pickups.

The first was Coley Stickels, the man who, in my humble opinion, has the most creative workouts in the country. Stickels has cut a swath through various club coaching jobs over the last decade, and success has always followed. Although, Stickels has a reputation for being even more of a loose cannon than Looze. That's where the mad scientist part comes in. 

He followed that dagger by pulling in Mark Hill, formerly of Michigan and currently at Old Dominion Aquatic Club (and his own business Flow Swimming). Hill played an instrumental role in Michigan's 2013 National Title, and has spent the last year disrupting the swim clinic game. Hill will also help IU's already strong recruiting with his impossible-to-not-likeability. 

While NC State is everyone's favorite ascendent team right now, Indiana is now staking their claim. They've built a coaching staff that can put them in contention for a National title very soon, even if Eddie Reese doesn't retire. 

Want advice on how to put your coaching staff together for a competitive advantage? Looking for a college job and want someone to give you an edge? Write me. 

It's Our Responsibility to Make FINA Additions Work

Last week, FINA addressed a longtime wrong in the swimming world, adding the women's 1500 to the program (as well as a men's 800 and a mixed relay). But it seems many in the swimming community were less than satisfied. "Where are the 50s?" they cried.

Since then I've seen a lot of squabbling about the change. There seems to be broad consensus that adding a women's 1500 is a really good thing, especially since the original reason for it not existing was so blatantly misogynistic that it was very embarrassing to still have on the books.

Two major criticisms have emerged. One is that the distance events are not in of themselves additive to the growth of swimming, particularly pro swimming in between Olympics. The second is that the 50s would be. I think both these arguments miss the point.

Let's take distance races, for example. American audiences are never shown 800s or 1500s in their entirety on broadcast TV. I've seen worse sins in Europe, where many meets go to the extreme of droning pop music over races 200 and above. They seem to have given up on developing any true fandom with this strategy.

Why do they cut away from distance races? Because Americans find them boring. Do you know what else Americans find boring? 1-0 Soccer matches. The rest of the world, however, has managed to find them absolutely thrilling. 

We have a responsibility to educate and bring in new fans to our sport in both distance and sprint swimming. Sports are no fun when you don't know what is going on. Which is why whenever possible you should have an announcer at your meet, especially for the distance races, to give context to the people watching.

The 50s are marginally more exciting to an uneducated audience, and you can count me among the many who would love to see them on the Olympic stage. But the quick splash and dash nature only papers over the same problem we have with growing our sport- even some people who should be top fans of swimming have little context for what happens during a fifty. 

Swimming's biggest problem right now is that we are not an inclusive sport. We make many decisions without empathy for wide swaths of people involved (or potential people involved) that haven't been fully converted to rabid fandom. If we want a true professional sport, we're going to need a lot more than me and some other bloggers in the basement to do it. 

The Joy of Swimming By Yourself

I swim by myself*. That's not very remarkable. After all, plenty of people show up to the pool, put their heads down and plod back and forth on the black line. Many of them are not competitive swimmers, they are the "recreational" swimmers that drive many "competitors" to practices. Also, swimming with other people can be fun and motivating.

For many people though, doing workouts on your own can make or break whether you continue to compete. Better yet, there are a lot of reasons why swimming on your own can be even better than being on a team. Let's talk about them:

1. You do a workout just for you- Every time you add another variable to a given workout (another person), it becomes more and more challenging to fit that workout to the swimmers to it.

2. You swim on your own time- I've heard rumor that people are busy these days. Sometimes even the most well made schedule of practices can mean that you sacrifice going to the pool because it just doesn't fit. When you swim by yourself, you swim on your own time when it works for you.

3. You are an introvert- For introverts, the socialization at large group team practices can really be draining and distracting from the energy you need to workout. Especially if you use training to "recharge" from other activities, a solo swim can be an incredible time to not have to talk to other people.

4. Swimming by yourself is infinitely better than not swimming- If there is any other immovable object stopping you from swimming by yourself, get in the pool alone. A lot of people who want to swim consistently don't because they beat themselves up over a 30 minute swim by themselves not being "good enough". Hogwash.

Today I started my day by going to my local pool for a swim. It was refreshing for both my mind and body, and I left with a feeling of accomplishment. Another day at the pool is a good day.

Want help training for competitive swimming by yourself? Write me.

A Frustrating Listen: What Comes First

Yesterday, I took a listen to the Gutter Lane podcast's return. Zac Adams, the host, had one of the most well-regarded coaches in the country on. Todd DeSorbo has received a lot of well-deserved praise for his outstanding work with sprinters at NC State.

But I couldn't help but get frustrated very early on in the podcast. As both men admitted, they were recording just after the funeral of Jason Turcotte, a coach admired by so many in the swimming community. The issue of work-life balance in swimming could not be more topical at the moment.

Adams tried to engage DeSorbo on the topic. Surely, on a staff with multiple coaches at the age where they have young children, they must have discovered some secret sauce for work life balance. If they have we didn't hear it.

Instead, DeSorbo demurred (all that follows are not direct quotes and paraphrasing:.. "I could certainly do better, we could certainly do better" he said. "Our goal is to outwork everyone" was almost a defensive response to any suggestion that they were taking less time to do an outstanding job. Finally, I heard the same old tired story I've heard a hundred times before "my/our wives are very understanding".

I'm sorry, but screw that. I got angrier and angrier the more I listened to the podcast. DeSorbo had plenty to say about recruiting, training sprinters and the professional career of Cullen Jones. Family? We'll figure that out later. I totally understand that many people would like DeSorbo to "stick to swimming", but it clearly seemed like Adams knew something really great about how they do things at NC State but never got DeSorbo to get it out.

As pretty much everyone knows, "we'll figure that out later" almost always turns into "never". It shouldn't be a pre-requisite to high level success in the swimming world that your spouse just "knows how it is" and accepts a lesser standard from you.

As coaches, we have a higher calling. We talk about coaching people first and athletes second. We need to walk our talk. Our athletes need to see us leading healthy complete lives. They need to see us putting our families first, and asking our work to understand that.

The coaches that look up to us need to see that the path to the top is not paved that way.

I have to imagine DeSorbo's family life is better than it sounded. If this post makes me sound angry at him, I'm not. I'm angry at the culture he describes, but for him I feel great sadness. Having met Todd many times, I've found him to be a kind and humorous. I have no doubt that he loves his family very much. 

When people are dying, no one thinks to themselves "I wish I'd worked more". But you can bet they do think "I wish I'd spent more time with my family". I truly believe that you don't have to change your measures of success to live that way. I think there's an even higher level of athletic success we can find when we as coaches start living a healthy, full life. 

The Pessimism Trap

Over the last weekend I had the pleasure or presenting on the skill of optimism to swimmers at the Midwestern Elite IMX Camp. It's a tough conversation to have with anyone, but especially young athletes. Why? Because pessimism can be a performance enhancer for young athletes.

First, let's back up and define both terms. By optimism and pessimism I am talking about explanatory style. Explanatory style is the way you explain events to yourself. Pessimistic explanatory style involves taking good events and depersonalizing them while making them seem specific and unlikely to happen again. Let me give you an example.

Let's say you had an athlete that broke through and qualified for Sectionals for the first time. A pessimistic athlete might explain it themselves the following way:

"It was so easy" (It had little to do with my effort to create the result)

"I was really feeling good in the water" (It was specific and not pervasive)

"I had the swim of my life" (Once in a lifetime events are by nature not likely to happen again).

Some coaches might find those statements to be "positive" or even praiseworthy. While most coaches wouldn't encourage all of those statements, pessimistic young athletes have a certain false humility that can be tempting for coaches to encourage. They are "tough on themselves" and "accountable". They don't "rest on their laurels". I say false humility because humility is also a term we misunderstand in sports contexts.

The core of humility is putting yourself on an equal plane with others and recognizing that in the words of the late, great, Chris Peterson "other people matter". Humility is not dismissing your own personal role in the positive events that take place in your life.

Young athletes often succeed with pessimism for a couple reasons. One is pessimism can work as a motivator in the short term. Sometimes we call it "staying hungry" in sports. The second is that younger people are in many ways nearly as emotionally resilient as they are physically.

This morning, my three year old transitioned from crying to singing happily within about three minutes. Teenagers are known for their "mood swings", which are really an evolving emotional resiliency. Adults are far more "steady". This is when pessimism's positives for athletic performance get overwhelmed by the damage it does.

The motivation that pessimism creates is not enough to overcome the downward spirals of pessimistic thinking. The older an athlete gets, the harder time they have pulling out of these spirals. Eventually, they are left "burned out" or worse.

It's incumbent on us as coaches to teach optimism as a skill for the long term development of athletes (and people). Otherwise, we are sacrificing long term life success for very short term athletic success.

Want to learn more about how to up your mental game? Write me!

Step Outside Your Swimming Bubble

This past weekend I traveled to Fremont, Nebraska, for the first Midwestern Swimming IMX Elite Camp. It was my third trip to the cornhusker state, the last two being for Olympic trials in 2008 and 2012. This time I was leaving the enclave of big city Omaha for "real" Nebraska.

I grew up in one of the smaller swimming communities in the US. Over the last decade plus I've had the chance to explore the swimming world. I haven't nearly gotten to it all, but I can't recommend this strongly enough: if you get the chance to meet people far away from where you are, take it!

Stepping into middle America, it was easy to see why the US is the world's greatest swimming power. It wouldn't be hard to come up with a list of excuses for American failure. Instead everywhere you look there are thriving pockets.

What I saw in Nebraska made me feel more hope for the future of our sport. For all the talk of "kids these days" and the associated problems, I saw great strength in the young people in and out of the water.

Much is made in coaching circles about how there are "many ways up the mountain", and that's true I guess. But I think it often misses the point. Young people are exceptional at adapting to many different kinds of training and stimuli, finding a way to take imperfect coaching and make great results.

As the weekend wrapped up, that great promise was on display. We did a start session at the end of the weekend. Ten repetitions for each swimmer over thirty minutes, and there was measurable improvement all around. Coaching is a hell of a drug.

Do you want to supercharge your team's or your own swimming? Write me!

Chris DeSantis Coaching and Pro Swim Workouts

Today, I'm really happy to announce Chris DeSantis Coaching's first partnership. I'll be working with Pro Swim Workouts, beginning with a podcast, to continue to my mission of providing better conversations around swimming.

The partnership grew out of a conversation with Nico Messer of Pro Swim Workouts shortly after I revived the Swim Brief podcast. Nico saw a gap in the swimming podcast world. When he presented it to me, I agreed wholeheartedly, and we agreed to try and fill that gap together.

Don't let me get too far ahead of myself. Why Pro Swim Workouts? Because I believe that Pro Swim Workouts walks the walk when it comes to making the swimming world better. It spreads knowledge, including the type of practical stuff (workouts from top coaches) that you used to have to fly, book a hotel and sit through hours of a conference to see.

Pro Swim Workouts puts money in the hands of swim coaches in exchange for their valuable work, and I like that. It also gives that valuable work to beginning coaches who so desperately need it. Now, we want to take a conversation into a dynamic format. Each podcast will feature a discussion of workouts, addressing all the questions you might have as a coach (or swimmer) about a given workout.

What is the point of this workout? Why should I do it? How do you implement the workout the best way possible? How does this workout fit into the greater context of a week, month, cycle or season?

These are the kind of questions we'll try answer. and we don't pretend to know everything. This is a podcast for people who want to hear an intelligent conversation about swimming training, and although we can't deny that we'll bring our own biases to the table, we're also going to work hard to not treat training like religion. Part of the journey will be trying to figure out how workouts neither Nico or I would ever use ourselves can work for other coaches.

The podcast will start with a bi-weekly format, with room to increase depending on demand. So get ready to join in the conversation with us and talk some workouts.

What Good Announcing Can Do For Your Meet

Sports announcing is something people love to hate. All the major American sports have announcers, and while we love to pick on their mistakes, they add a lot of value to a sporting event.

In swimming, the most famous announcers are two men: Rowdy Gaines and Sam Kendricks. Gaines is the color commentator on all major international competitions, as well as the NCAA championships (for broadcasts). Kendricks is lesser known outside of swimming but legendary within it for memorizing names, pronunciations and his relentless energy.

Gaines gets a lot of crap (undeserved) for the way he talks about Olympic races. He's doing what he's asked to do, which is to make swimming appeal to an audience that is possibly turning into the first swim meet they have ever seen. 

(Confession: I met Rowdy Gaines in person once and if you have the same chance you will be so overwhelmed by what a nice man he is you will struggle to ever say a critical word about him the rest of your life).

All of this is beside the point. Rather than criticizing Gaines, or Kendricks, lets focus on the hundreds, nay thousands, of swim meets that drone on without any announcing to help. Here are several ways good announcing can help your swim meet:

1. CONTEXT! You know what's exciting? Two swimmers trying to break 6:00 min for the first time in the 500. Many of the swimmers and parents and anybody else that may have wandered by a swim meet will not know this? An announcers job is to get you involved from the first stroke- tell the story of what's happening in the water.

I used to find soccer horribly boring. Why? Because I didn't understand anything about the sport. I spent half a season "coaching" soccer at the start of my career, and my enjoyment went up exponentially having context for all of the things I saw happening on the field.

2. Energy- Again, many exciting things happen at a swim meet. People will not instinctually recognize them. They need leadership- someone with a microphone that is energized at the appropriate times.

No one likes to listen to somebody who is raving like a maniac non-stop, but the appropriate energy and love for what is happening in a swimming pool is infectious (and we need more of it)

3. Building fans- The general state of swimming fandom is sorry. Ask young swimmers to name who was in the Olympics even a year later and you will face a struggle.

This is not young swimmers' faults. We need to build fandom in swimming from the ground up. Swimmers and everyone else in attendance in swim meet need to be educated from the grassroots up. We have such an easy sport to understand on some levels (people race each other and someone wins). It's not a huge leap to explain enough of the bigger details to people to make swimming interesting.

The responsibility for good atmosphere at swim meets should not rest on coaches and volunteers alone. Meet organizers should consider adding quality announcing to the benefit of all involved.

Interested in having an energetic, experiences announcer at your next meet? 

It's Lonely at The Top: Head Coach's Dilemma

Becoming a head coach is sort of like becoming a parent. All of the work you to up to that point doesn't really translate to the job that you suddenly have. Where once you could rest easy that someone else was steering the ship, you now lay awake at night either fretting about or actively navigating around icebergs.

Being a head coach is lonely, and most coaches don't get a lot of warning for that. Swim coaching can be a lonely profession overall, with a strange schedule compounding a weird tribalism. When you're coming up the ranks you often have the benefit of working on a "staff", so at least you have some peers to share the experience with.

Head coaches don't often have peers. All of a sudden, all the assistant coaches are going out for a beer after the meet without you. More than socially isolating, the challenge of continuing your coaching development when you become a head coach is the real nut to crack.

Swim coaching relies on an apprenticeship model. You learn from the coaches you work with. When you start out, you may have many other "peer" coaches as well as a coach above you. Head coaches have few peers, certainly rarely within their own team, certainly no daily teacher above them. 

One possible solution is to work cooperatively with other head coaches in your area. Your results may vary- in many cases your peers at this level may fail to see the value in improving a competitor coach. Another solution is to attend clinics and talks, but these sort of one-off experiences don't provide the ongoing experiential learning so many coaches crave.

Hiring a coach consultant for continuing education is the best of both worlds. You get a peer, someone who can help you get better (and by that virtue make your whole team better) whose only vested interest is your improvement. You also get the consistency and continued support over a length of time to actually fully develop. 

Are you coach feeling isolated that wants to up your coaching game? Write me for a free consulation. 

Why The Short Course Explosion Hasn't Gone Long

Caeleb Dressel's swimming is so fast you can't believe it. Already an NCAA record holder after just his sophomore season, he pushed it to a whole new level this past spring, with new records in the 50 free (18.20), 100 free (40.00) and 100 butterfly (43.58).

That's right, as if his mind boggling 100 freestyle that put him on the doorstep of 39 wasn't enough, he also beat the man (Joseph Schooling) who beat Michael Phelps, in Schooling's best event.

For all his mind-blowing swimming, Dressel wasn't even on the US Olympic team in the 50 free and put up a couple solid 100 freestyles (47.9 and 48.1) on the 4x100 Freestyle relay. What demands explanation is, how can a swimmer like Dressel be so much faster in short course than an all-timer like Matt Biondi.

Biondi's best short course 100 was 41.87, giving Dressel a nearly two second advantage in that race. In the 100m, where a margin should theoretically be bigger due to the longer race, Dressel is just .9 faster (47.5 to 48.4).

Dressel is just one glaring example of a trend. Short course swimming (especially yards swimming) has seen an explosion in improvement over the last two decades. That improvement hasn't translated to long course meters, the Olympic format. So it begs the question: why?

The Skill Explosion

Basketball fans: have you ever watched highlights of Bob Cousy? The greatest ball-handler of his generation doesn't exactly blow people's minds with his moves in 2017. Yes, I know they allow more palming now- blah blah blah. Basketball has seen a skill explosion.

In swimming, skills are all the stuff that's not pure swimming (starts, turns, underwater kicking/pullouts)

Take a look at Matt Biondi swimming, at his peak (race starts around 3:24):

Here's Caeleb Dressel (shown in long course for accurate comparison)

There are some obvious differences that stand out right away. Dressel's start is worlds better than what Biondi or anyone was doing in a bygone era. 

Even more so than the aerial theatrics is what happens when they enter the water. I've watched enough Biondi races to know that this wasn't a particularly bad breakout. Seen with modern eyes, Biondi always had a bad breakout. 

He surfaces on too steep of an angle, his head lurching awkwardly up to the surface and looking straight forward. I went frame by frame at the turn, and it appears Biondi doesn't even fully streamline, and his legs are loose and unconnected behind him. 

Meanwhile, on the surface, Biondi seems like he could be swimming today. In fact, I would venture to say that if we could de-age Biondi and teach him a proper start, turn, and how to kick underwater, he might still be the world's best over 100m. 

The Short Of It

A focus on short course swimming can account for this skill explosion. Short course swimming rewards skills, as does higher intensity and measured race pace training. In three years coaching in Europe, I noticed that the majority of European countries placed a much higher focus on long course swimming. 

While that led them to have fit athletes, overall you can see a broad deficiency in skill especially at junior levels in European swimming. This, broadly, is why many European athletes have a lot of NCAA success- they pair a strong fitness with increased skill development and make a performance leap.

A leap in long course performance is possible- but it rests on two huge developments. The first will be some significant innovation in overwater stroke technique. Adam Peaty is a good example of a swimmer who has made massive improvements in the world standard of long course performance despite below-average skills.

The second innovation will come with a continued evolution of race pace training to prepare swimmers better for long course racing. There are some inherent conflicts in the race pace theories- with one of the biggest ones being that specificity is given a ton of value, but somehow you should swim repeat short course 25y or 25m to prepare for a long course 100m.

Any coach can tell you that where swimmers struggle to translate their performance in long course is from 25-50m, maintaining their stroke technique, speed and efficiency. I saw it first hand when I used race pace and skill to get a swimmer who had never broken 1:00 in 100 breaststroke to a 55 in short course yards. That swimmer promptly went to Summer Nationals and swam a 1:09 in LCM, which is a nice argument for Long Course only Olympic Trial standards.

Want to bring better analysis to your stroke technique and practice planning? Write me.

The Different Demands of Race Pace Coaching

"5000 Pull". That was all Gennadi Touretski, often hailed as a the genius of the swim coaching world, wrote up on the board. Then he walked away.

I heard this story from a swimmer who was training with Touretski as a part of his required Swiss army service. Touretski had for some time assumed the mantle of working with these swimmers, but didn't seem particularly interested in coaching them.

The purpose of this post is not to mock Touretski, who's coaching relationship with all-time great Alexander Popov is the stuff of legends. Touretski has used his coaching mind in far more creative ways than "5000 pull", but on this particular practice, he clearly wasn't feeling it.

I'm left to guess as to why. Did he feel the swimmers in the water weren't worth the effort? Was he not getting properly compensated for his time? I tried to put myself in his place- what would have to be going on for me to throw in the towel with a 5000 pull?

Intense Coaching

One of the least discussed aspects of the ongoing debate in the swimming community over practice intensity is how demanding the coaching is. Coaching a 5000 pull (especially if you walk off the deck and don't even watch it) is very light lifting. 

Meanwhile, a set where swimmers are going to swim 20x50 at 200 pace is exceptionally demanding on a coach. Swimmers need constant technical feedback, and will have time to hear it. Furthermore, having it "all on the line" means that swimmers will need specific adjustments based on where they are that day.

So, a coach that wants to do the right thing and change over to race pace will face some real challenges in doing so. For one, they will have to carefully consider whether they will still spend the same amount of time on deck, knowing that they will be coaching at a full sprint instead of a slow walk?

Do they want to have the same number of swimmers in the water? How will they divide attention between swimmers when there is so much more time that they are on the wall and able to receive feedback?

Race pace swimming undeniably demands more from the coach for the time spent on the pool deck. The tradeoff is better quality of both technical instruction for the swimmers in the water and just flat out more coaching.

Swimmers get a lot more value, and coaches should consider that as they change to race pace. Coaches should expect to get something of value in return for this expansion, a not easy feat with many administrators and boards. But it's crucial to start at the very beginning, before race pace becomes the "new normal" for swimming practice and coaches keep everything else on their plate.

Want to learn more about how to incorporate race pace into your own training or your team's? Write me!

Where Coaching Accountability Goes Wrong

Coaches love to glorify accountability. We love stories of athlete's "owning up" to their own weaknesses and failures, taking responsibility for them and then making a positive change. "If only more of my athletes were like that" we get caught thinking. 

"Accountability" may make coaches feel all warm and fuzzy in our stomachs. It may also reinforce a stereotype we have about "kids these days" and their lack of it. It's not the best way to coach. If we want to create thriving, resilient athletes, we should focus much less on accountability and far more on depersonalizing failure.

It's not about you

Funny enough, many coaches think of "accountability" as a selfless attitude. I'm about to argue that it is destructively selfish. In taking your failings and making them personal, you're actually draining the energy you need to make change.

Last week I put out a resilience test for swimmers. The test is based on explanatory style. Explanatory style, put simply, is the way that you explain events to yourself.

One aspect of optimistic people is that they tend not to attribute negative events to themselves, i.e they do not take personal "accountability" for bad events. As coaches we desperately want optimistic athletes- these are the people that will shoot high, push to the extreme and bounce back from failure.

Pessimistic people, on the other hand, tend to be very "accountable". More often than not, the negative things that happen to them are "their fault". They are ones that will "stay comfortable" in training and be haunted by failure.

Ego Protection

Again, we tend to think of those that are not "accountable" as egotistical. This is a social concept. I'm not suggesting athletes should not take blame for anything. Then you would just have a team of assholes.

A lot of "accountability", however,  is about ego protection. Coaches like to hear their athletes take responsibility for failures because it protects their ego. "It wasn't my fault," the coach can say to herself as the athlete takes the blame. 

Coaches need to model and teach optimistic explanatory style for their athletes if they expect to have optimistic athletes. One step is to drop all the ego protection around "accountability" and teach athletes to depersonalize failure so they can move on. 

Want to learn about how to make optimistic thriving athletes? Write me!

 

Get Faster, Faster: Work on Starts

Of all the skills you need to swim fast, the block start stands alone. It is the only swimming "technique" that has your entire body out of the water. Somehow, despite how simple the fundamentals for a good start are, poor start technique is everywhere, from the beginning to elite levels.

Don't believe me? I used to have a terrible start. I spent my first two years in competitive swimming tucking my knees into my chest to protect from belly flops. By the time I finished college, I had progressed to a slow two-foot on the front of the blocks leap.

So when I made my masters swimming comeback this year, I knew I needed to get better. But more than any other technique, it's really impossible to improve your start unless you can see what you're doing. Because I always swim alone, I had to sheepishly ask a lifeguard to film me.

Then I watched the video, and tried again. It didn't take a lot of attempts, but considerable focus to change my instincts.

When I got to my first meet, this happened (I'm in the farthest lane with a white cap)

Slow the video down to quarter speed at the start. It wasn't a perfect start, but I smoked my competition off the blocks. My start went from "mildly terrible" to pretty good with just a little bit of work. 

So how did I do it?

Start Learning

The nature of coaching swimming is that most knowledge is passed down from coach to coach. For whatever reason, very little knowledge about starts makes its way out there. That's a shame, because a start can have a huge impact on a swim.

Most people focus on reaction time, and if you do that you'd think there is very little reason to work on starts. Bad reaction times are in .8 or slower, good ones are .6 (sometimes .5, I was .58 in the video above. So why spend a lot of time on something that only means a couple of tenths difference?

The start has a domino effect on the race that follows it. A good start can get you into clean water, allowing you to swim free from the disturbance of others. Think Anthony Ervin with a slightly better start winning Olympic gold again. 

Having a great start also gives you a psychological benefit. I used to panic after my start- knowing that I had to play catchup on the rest of the field. Having a good start allowed me to settle down and swim my race as I had planned.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the kind of flexibility work you need to do to work on your start improves your technique on all four strokes, as well as turns and underwater swimming. One of the most frequent questions I see posted to the Swim Coaches Idea Exchange group on facebook is "Help with this start!". I'm here to help.

Are you a coach that wants to be great at coaching starts or a swimmer looking to get a competitive edge? Write me