Coaches: Lets Demand Action

Yesterday, I spelled out a couple steps that anyone, anywhere in swimming could do to help change swimming as we know it.

Today I want to focus on the biggest reading audience of this blog, coaches. As a coach myself, I've been working hard to figure out what we can do to improve our sport break the cycle.

The first step for coaches is to admit that our culture, as it stands today, is not a good culture for athletes. A part of any solution going forward has to begin by acknowledging that we should look to athletes for leadership about how they would like coaches to be a part of their sport. Athletes must come first.

With that said, here are the start of some of the actions coaches can put pressure on USA Swimming to take.

1) Release individuals immediately from any confidentiality agreements, period. USA Swimming needs transparency and sunlight. This should include, but not be limited to, FAST, Sean Hutchison, Mark Schubert, and Everett Uchiyama. We cannot move forward with effective solutions, and the maze of confidentiality agreements is a huge barrier to true transparency within our governing body.

We need to demand this even if the response is that doing so will completely bankrupt USA Swimming. No organization is more important than the well-being of athletes in our sport.

2) USA Swimming must release the tens of thousands of pages of coach complaint files that they have. They are sitting on information that deserves a public airing and could potentially save many future athletes from abuse.

These suggestions are just a beginning of what coaches can use their power to demand. Make your demand public, or reach out directly to the people that are accountable to you within USA Swimming. Send your demand as a letter directly to USA Swimming Executive Director Tim Hinchey, or USA Swimming President Jim Sheehan. 

In the coming days, I will be asking coaches to use their platforms to amplify this message and more to the power structure of USA Swimming.

Enough With the Victim Blaming

It's not even been a week since Ariana Kukors bravely told the story of what happened to her at the hands of her swim coach, Sean Hutchison. Already there is a disturbing trend in the discussion of it. To varying degrees, Kukors has been maligned. The arguments I've heard are something like follows:

"She was a consenting adult to the sex because they had sex after she was 18 years old"

If this is how you read the story, I'm going to ask you to reconsider. I'm being polite today because several friends reached out to me yesterday and asked me to stop being so angry. That's hard for me- abusive coaches have really hurt the sport I love, but more importantly really hurt people that I care about. 

It's worth reading Kukors' story several times, even though it is hard. People are fixating on the handshake as the first step to grooming. Don't fall into this trap- shaking hands is not a in isolation. Grooming children who you hold power over for sex is. So if you ask kids to shake your hands, 

Power is the key to understanding this story. Hutchison held huge influence and power over Kukors and others. I do not believe that a 16 year old girl can consent to sexual contact with her 34 year old swim coach. 

Likewise, Kukors story reveals that Hutchison used another power imbalance to his advantage. He knew what he was doing was wrong- victims are often far less certain about what is right and wrong due to their age and position.

That he "saved" intercourse until she was 18 is a key tell. He knew what he was doing was wrong and was trying to do it in a way that would leave him less exposed to legal jeopardy. Even though he knew he was in the wrong, he effectively transferred the shame onto his victim and used that power to tighten his grip.  

So please, spare all of us the insinuation that Kukors somehow consented to any of this. 

So What Do We Do Now?

I mentioned that friends reached out to me, and even a few people that I had never spoken to. This is the part where I tell them "I hear you". They wanted less anger and more proactive steps. So here are some proactive steps.

1. Offer whatever platform or forum you have for the girls and women you know in the sport to talk about what they would like to see get better. Many of them will not want to- be empathetic to that.

I believe that prominent female voices within the sport will be speaking out on this very issue in the next few days, and there will be strength in numbers that there has not been before in this moment

2. If you are a man, get out and positively support what these women and girls are saying. Take their suggestions to heart and think about real change you can effect in whatever domain you have.

That's it. I think that step one will reveal a lot about what step two should be. It's time for big change and the moment is now. 

Silence is Complicity

Yesterday was a whirlwind. I spoke to more people than I can properly remember, all about the topic of the day. This day there will be more, I'm sure.

Here's a message for all those conversations, and the ones I'm not having. The time is now. Speak your truth.

There are people who know more about Sean Hutchison, FAST, "SafeSport", Mark Schubert and all the other tentacles of this story. Some of them, like Dia Rianda or Dagny Knutson, have been ignored. It's time to start listening. 

There are other people who know more who haven't spoken. Right now they are waiting on the sidelines. I hear their stories third or fourth hand. I have empathy for the fact that some of them have also been hurt in this situation. They do not want to be defined by what they know and said.

I think soon they will be defined by what they knew and didn't say. Their silence makes them complicit in this story repeating itself. 

Everyone is scared right now, myself included. When I told my wife I would begin writing about this full force again, her first inclination was to beg me not to. Part of me agreed. I knew that keeping my mouth shut, however, just wasn't an option.

Eight years ago, I questioned why big name coaches like Bob Bowman contribute nothing to this discussion. The same question is worth asking today. These are people with powerful platforms, that they have used to advocate for far more trivial issues. What does their silence say?

There is a huge category of silent partners right now who can still play their part. We need more than silence from them too. If you're reading this and you think "I don't have any special knowledge, I'm not a big name, I don't even know what to say". Say something. Use my words if you want. You have a platform. The time for silence is over. 

Hold Their Feet to The Fire

I'll be honest: I'm mad. I don't know where to start.

In the days since Ariana Kukors publicly revealed not only the brutal manipulation and abuse that Sean Hutchison inflicted on her, but the insidious grooming process he used to achieve it, the other characters in this story have been far too silent.

It's time to hold some feet to the fire. This blog is directed specifically at the media covering this story.

It is not an attack. It is a request. Hold their feet to the fire.

Who are they? Like I said, it's hard to know where to start. Here are two suggestions:

Mark Schubert

Schubert, who played a huge role in enabling Sean among many, many other things, is out in the media trying to cast himself as some sort of whistleblower that was ignored back in 2010. 

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Schubert took his knowledge of Sean and used it as leverage to his own gain. He gladly accepted $625,000 to keep his mouth shut and went his way.

Oh, and he hired the man, Bill Jewell, who oversaw Hutchison day to day at FAST, Jewell was another enabler who fashioned himself as a whistleblower. He was quoted in the original Washington Post article in 2010 saying that he had looked into the "rumors" and addressed them with Sean.

Jewell would go on to be banned for three years from coaching by USA Swimming after a real whistleblower, Dia Rianda, actually held some feet to the fire.

As Craig Lord aptly put in a facebook comment underneath Schubert's latest distortion, there is some basic journalism that anyone that talks to Schubert should engage in. Spend 5 minutes googling Mark Schubert and Sean Hutchison and catch up on some of the above. Ask some follow up questions.

Mark Schubert is not a hero in this story. He is one of the villains.

USA Swimming

USA Swimming cannot be allowed to put out statements like the one they did for Kukors without strong pushback. 

Here's the worst part of that statement:

"During the USA Swimming investigation, both Ariana and Hutchison, as well as Ariana’s sister, Emily, unequivocally denied the existence of a romantic or sexual relationship"

USA Swimming loves to be cagey with revealing details about their "investigations", but here they are changing the rules and burning Kukors to defend themselves. 

Kukors own story provides so many questions USA Swimming needs to answer. Why did their investigation consist of one brief phone call to Kukors? Why were they in such a rush to consider this "case closed" and move on?

Why did they have to pay Mark Schubert $625,000 dollars for his silence if nothing happened?

Most importantly, where do they get off throwing a sexual abuse victim under the bus? How do they justify that their organization is somehow more important than the welfare of a human being? 

So again, my request goes out. Craig Lord, Swimswam, Deadspin, Scott Reid at the OC Register and anyone else that has shown a modicum of interest in this story. Hold their feet to the fire, keep asking questions, and don't let up until we get the answers we deserve.

Coaches Can Do Better for Athletes Like Kukors

Yesterday, the axe finally fell on Sean Hutchison. For the first time, publicly at least, Ariana Kukors spoke about how he groomed her for sexual abuse from a young age. 

I've been known to go after big organizations, like USA Swimming and ASCA, in this space. They certainly can do far better, and USA Swimming in particular is already out there blasting PR that they did everything they could.

I almost got whiplash from how quickly they announced (via their propaganda outlet, Swimming World Magazine) that Kukors had denied a sexual relationship in 2010. 

Lets set all that aside, and talk about us. And by us I mean coaches. Because we have a huge role to play in whether abusers get a free pass and athletes live in fear. It was that fear that kept Kukors silent for so long.

There was plenty of smoke when it came to Sean Hutchison for nearly a decade. The crumbling of the center he was running in Fullerton, the facile implication that some part of his relationship with Kukors went beyond coaching.

The coaching community could have held his feet to the fire. We could have demanded answers and transparency from him. Instead we let it go, and he got to re-brand himself as a swimming entrepreneur with Ikkos.

He also, in the past couple years, got to be a headliner at the School of Thought Clinic down at the University of Tennessee. 

A lot of discussion around this will center on the fact that "our hands were tied" without Kukors willing to publicly denounce Hutchison. That ignores the fact that we, as coaches, could have chosen a braver stance, that let a victim like Kukors know where our culture stood.

We did not need to continue to put Hutchison on a pedestal. We did not need to fawn over him and talk about what a genius coach he was.

I had the chance to meet Hutchison early in my coaching career. He didn't much like me (go figure). I might have had a chance had I respected my elders a bit more. It would be have been very advantageous to my own career advancement to try and buddy up to him.

At the same time, I was also too scared to put him on blast here. Hutchison used his considerable power to evade this moment for quite a long time, and that made him scary.

Hutchison is not the end, he's still the beginning. As coaches, we need to become less defensive, less scared, and hold each other to the fire a little more. We need to step up for athletes and let them know that we are willing to do what's right for them, even if it means going against powerful peers.

Why I'm Ditching the Word "Performance"

Over the weekend, I was talking to a teenage swimmer about optimism. Like most of us, pessimism came naturally to him. I asked him what kinds of thoughts went through his head after a bad race.

Five minutes later, I cut him off. I had lost count of the personal recriminations he had leveled against himself. 

As we walked through the ways he could train optimism, I had a revelation. Not once did I use the "p" word. You know what i'm talking about. Performance. 

Why should I? Swimming was the context in which I was helping this young man, but I did not really care whether it helped his swimming. It would be pleasant, of course, but far from the point. 

When I started this business with Positive Psychology at it's base, I included this word in a few descriptions of what I had to offer. Today I scrubbed them away. 

I had put it up there because I thought it was what people wanted. There are probably a lot who do. But it's not what I'm offering.

Better swimming times is a nice side effect. That's all it is. Competition comes really naturally to us, so of course we think about how we're doing, how it compares to other, and many of us try to improve. That's all fine and good.

Optimism is a real skill and worth working on, even if you never set foot in a pool ever again in your life. It might save your life, in more ways than one.

Relationships are the most important thing in life. Working on how to have better ones, with your friends, your teachers and coaches, and your own family, is therefore definitely worth some time. 

If you get a little faster in the 100 breaststroke as a result of that, great. 

I understand that we live in a world (especially as coaches) where we will be judged heavily on results. Club coaches are heavily accountable for how they do in their local area of LSC. College coaches get hounded by their athletic directors about their conference ranking.

In that environment, it can be easy to lose your mind. You can slowly become indoctrinated to focus more and more on results. Your mind will work on rationalizations for why you are sacrificing things that are, in reality, far more important. 

If performance is the most important thing to you, you'll find plenty of psychology "experts" out there with the word front and center. I'm sure they'll be happy to work with you. 

Want to join the conversation? Write me. 

If You Have to Ask: The Answer is No

Often, when I'm coaching swimmers, I think to myself: "I'm not sure what's going on here. I better figure it out". I have questions, and I want them answered. As a coach, it is good to lean into that curiosity. 

However, there are some questions that you really do not need to ask. There is such thing as a dumb question. Here, in no particular order, is a list of questions you don't need to ask. Why? Because the answer is obviously "no!"

1. Are you having fun? 

Do you like fun? I think most people do. What kinds of things do you do when you're having fun? Do you smile, or laugh? What is your body language like? 

I talked to someone yesterday who expressed a similar sentiment when it comes to engagement. If you have to ask people if they are "engaged", you are kind of missing the point. It's very obvious when people are enjoying themselves, and when they are not. 

As a coach, you don't have to make things "fun" all the time, and it's certainly part of the job to create things that are only really "fun" after they are accomplished. Still, you don't need to ask people if they are having fun. 

If people are obviously having fun, great news! If not, ask yourself, or others, what you might do to change that. 

2. Are you ok? (To someone who is crying)

I waded into this question like a complete dumbass many times early in my career, particularly with female athletes. Someone who is crying is experiencing some pretty intense emotions. This prompt is somehow deeply coded into my man brain because although I know it's not worth asking I still slip up from time to time.

Asking them if they're ok can seem like a sensitive approach, but more likely you will signal to an athlete that you are uncomfortable with their emotional response or don't really understand. 

I've found better luck with simple statements that let someone know that you see them in pain, and want to help. And then, often, shutting up and letting them talk without judgement.

3. Are you ready for this?

I am cringing writing this paragraph. During one ACC Championship, when I was an assistant coach, there was some debate among the coaches about who to place on the relay. Should we put the swimmer who had for the majority of the season been a clear choice, but was struggling at the meet, or another swimmer who was performing better than usual. It was a coin flip.

What we decided to do was ask the struggling swimmer if she thought she would do a good job on the relay. And it was a disaster. The swimmer, already doubting herself, now all of a sudden had to deal with her coaches signaling their doubt too. 

Even the most confident swimmers will have to confront some doubts in stressful situations. As a coach, you will be stressed too. It is not the athlete's job, however, to reassure you,. 

4. Do you want to swim a 12,000 IM (or something like that)?

If they aren't begging you to do a 12,000 IM...they definitely do not want to do it. Trust me on this one. 

5. Do you want MUFFINS???? Or medals???

NO! Just no.

Coaches Need to Believe in Swimming's Reckoning

Right now, the leading story in Olympic sports is Gymnastics. Specifically, the actions of one team "doctor" Larry Nassar, who was allowed by many people with the power to stop him to molest hundreds of teenage girls.

Many are asking the right questions in this moment. How did we let this happen? How did so many people fail to protect these young athletes and enable such monstrous behavior?

Gymnastics is having a reckoning, with no end in sight. If anything, the pace of change only seems to be accelerating, with the stunning move to no longer have national team athletes train at Karolyi ranch.

I know a lot of people in swimming that think our "reckoning" is mostly over. What's closer to the truth is that it never happened. 

USA Gymnastics CEO Steven Penny had to resign in disgrace last March, and new CEO Kerry Perry is basically in constant damage control for the very existence of USA Gymnastics as an organization.

In swimming, Chuck Wielgus was able to assume a defensive posture, black out media except for the groveling Brent Rutemiller of Swimming World, and slowly start to implement "SafeSport" measures. He was able to retire with many people within USA Swimming considering him some kind of hero. 

New CEO Tim Hinchey has also been allowed to ignore USA Swimming's legacy altogether. In the near future I'll be asking him to come on a podcast to do a bit more than the current gestures toward SafeSport.

We can make all the rules we want. We can ban coaches, and make educational programs. None will address the true problem that our greater society is actually talking about and finally seeing a reckoning on. When "men" hold nearly all the power in anything, it will be abused, and anyone down the power food chain will suffer.

I've watched my "group", coaches remain mostly silent on this topic. We are the on the ground leaders of this sport, but we have failed to provide leadership. The major coaching organizations have shied away.

So I've decided that we need to organize as coaches to stand up for the most vulnerable people in our sport. I'm starting a group "Coaches Who Believe".

What does that mean? Instead of the status quo, (which is do nothing), we will trust people in our sport who come forward to say that they have been abused. We will work to verify those claims, instead of ignoring them or reflexively dismissing them. We will not leave the victims of abuse in our sport on an island, with only a handful of people to support them.

As for leadership of the organization, I hope that as soon as it gets some members I can cede that to someone else, preferably non-male. It's time to let somebody else run things for a while.

Kate Kovenock Is Bringing Brown Back From the Dead

A decade ago, Brown Swimming and Diving was in a dark place. In a league where you can practically set your watch to some order of finish between Harvard, Princeton and Yale, Brown was among the schools fighting to be "the best of the rest". Then, their pool, old and weird but 50m long, broke.

Brown tried to soften the recruiting blow it knew was coming by immediately announcing a new pool, but it would be years, spanning the career of entire classes, before that building materialized. 

But this blog is not about pool construction. It's about coaching. In 2014, Brown made a bold decision. They would split their men's and women's team. bucking a nationwide trending towards "combining" programs.

They hired Kate Kovenock, coming off a run as an assistant at Notre Dame that saw her take Emma Reaney, a 1:02 high school 100 breaststroker, to a 57.7. Oh, and she won Notre Dame's first women's NCAA title in the 200 breast.

Kovenock somehow remains underrated and undermentioned. But here's the short story: she was a top Division 3 swimmer. She kicked butt as an assistant coach at Kenyon. She tore it up at Notre Dame. When she came to Brown, the team had finished 6th in the conference the previous year and was non-competitive in relays.

The team would finish 6th again in her first year. But it was the most possible improvement you could possibly get and not make a move in the standings. All of a sudden, swimmers were having "Emma Reaney" like moments.

Kate Dillione, a 53 100 yard freestyle who had swum nicely at Brown, found an extra gear for her senior year and recorded a 49.68. The women's 400 freestyle relay leapt up to title contention with a second place finish. 

By her second season, Kovenock's team started to climb the standings, finishing 5th. Ally Donahue, a 2:21 high school breaststroker, was winning an Ivy title in 2:12. By 2016-2017, only a league record from ascendent Yale could stop Brown's 200 Medley relay from coming out on top.

I got inspired to write this because this past weekend, Harvard eeked out a victory over Brown in a double-dual, 166-134. Brown had to absorb the punishment of Harvard going 1-2-3 on both diving boards. I guarantee you the trend line of this dual meet, which as of last year was not close, does not comfort anyone in Cambridge.

Making a swimming powerhouse at Brown University is no easy task, but Kovenock seems up to the task. She's proving right now that she's one of the best young college coaches in the entire country by making Brown an exciting place to follow again. 

Remember That Tom Brady Used To Be Lazy

I only loosely follow the American football, but I am told that Tom Brady of the New England Patriots is one of the best football throwing men, if not the best in history. I've also heard that Bill Belichick is one of the most successful former Division III Lacrosse players at coaching American football. 

Now 40 and still playing at a high level, Brady's work ethic has only grown more legendary by the year. Perhaps you've heard about it, and there's a lot to be learned from what he has accomplished. As long as you don't follow the part that says proper hydration will save you from sunburns, which is about on the same level as some of the more byzantine swimming "training" methods. But I digress. 

Brady's legend grew out of the fact that in a certain point of time, many wise football men did not think that he would be one of the best ball throwers. To me, that is the interesting part of the story, when I think about what we do as coaches.

Why did so many people miss that Tom Brady was going to be great? Because he wasn't, yet. He came to the NFL Draft combine in 2000 and completely bombed, particularly in terms of his physical fitness. Tom Brady was not working (that) hard in 2000.

He was 22 going on 23 before he started to figure out what he needed to do to reach his ultimate potential. His lack of drive at that age meant that he nearly missed out on even playing professionally at all. 

I think about this while I'm watching a high school freshmen loaf his way up and down a pool, legs immobile as if he's got an imaginary rope binding his ankles. I remind myself when he stops short of the wall to make a joke to his friend. Does it make me angry? Of course it does.

So let's remain optimistic. We ought to be hopeful that people can figure it out, and that many of them will need abundant chances to do so. 

I remember being a teenager. I did not walk uphill both ways, in the snow. I did a lot of boneheaded things and wasted my potential and acted like a jerk when any well-meaning adult tried to talk to me about it. 

Somewhere out there, some part of Lloyd Carr is probably pissed that Tom Brady didn't figure out how to be TOM BRADY a little sooner. That's just how it goes sometimes. 

Three Things I was Dead Wrong About in 2017

A lot of people are putting up posts right now, collecting their best content of 2017. That sounded too boring and lazy to me, so instead here's what I'm going with. This blog has always been a space where I've been outspoken, and will continue to be that in 2018.

Despite some of my more controversial takes, I do try to not open my mouth about something unless I feel really confident in what I know. That's why you won't find me putting up articles about dryland, injury prevention or physics. I know a little about those topics (well, maybe not physics) I know I wouldn't want to read a blog written by somebody who just fires off about whatever.

Still, despite being somewhat careful in the topics I choose and what I know about them, I still miss the mark some time. So here's a post for everybody that has gotten furious about at least on the three posts I am about to feature. I'm sorry- I was wrong.

1. Expect Weirdness in Budapest: 

I had a pretty good 2016 predicting some big things in swimming. That gave me a little confidence to keep it going in 2017. But this post, predicting what would happen at the Budapest World Championship, had some big whiffs. To whit:

• I predicted that there would no women medalists in the 100 fly. Then Kelsi Worrell got a bronze. Doh. 
• Likewise, I didn't have much faith in the women's IM crew to get any medals. In fact I didn't even think enough of Madisyn Cox to feature her in the post. 

2. Virginia Should Hire Stefanie Moreno

I may be stretching the definition of "dead wrong" here, but bear with me. When revisiting this article, I feel two things are equally true:

• Virginia made a good decision to hire Todd DeSorbo, who immediately put together a strong coaching staff and the early results on UVA are really positive. You can't really argue with the decision they made, plucking the top assistant from a top ten program within the same conference. 
• There are other schools that will not be mentioned that totally blew it by not hiring Moreno. I have heard from several sources that she was turned down for several jobs where the person hired just doesn't have a resume that stacks up to Moreno. That's wrong and a blown opportunity for those schools. 

3. Announcing the Under One Project

A year and one day ago, I announced my personal quest to break a minute in the 100 breaststroke. I have not written about that quest for over seven months.

The reason is simple. My own vanity and my desire to protect it hasn't left me very motivated to tell you that I had weeks at a time where I didn't train or just barely sustained swimming.

That after getting down to a svelte 176 lbs for my last competition in March, I have hovered between 195-200 lbs this fall and winter. I can't fit into half the pants I wore last winter, and I'm embarrassed. 

But I should have, Because I learned in 2017 probably the biggest lesson of my life, and I still only learned it a little bit, if that makes sense. I learned a lot about the power of failure. I learned the emotional power of admitting that you need some help, and how that makes you stronger, not weaker. 

Starting my own business meant more failure in one year than I have experienced in all of my years of swimming, school and coaching combined. That's been hard, but I'm so grateful for the growth. 

A lot of us are making resolutions for the new year. My project was basically a resolution, and it fell apart by around May. It's fair to say I have failed, but also fair to say that five months moving towards something is infinitely better than nothing. And it's not over until I say it's over.

Happy 2018.

Your 2018 Guide To Hating On Michael Andrew

The new year approaches, and with it brings promise. There is the opportunity of a new day, a time for reflection and change.

For people that love to hate on Michael Andrew, 2018 is a really important year. While hating on Michael Andrew has gained in popularity ever since around 2012, there's something special about next year.

You see, this next year Michael Andrew will turn 19, and therefore no longer be a "junior" or "age group" swimmer. That offers some really exciting new avenues for anonymous internet persons to criticize, complain or otherwise minimize the accomplishments of a very fast swimmer.

There is an art to this. Much like Blaming Teri McKeever for Everything, the key to hating on Michael Andrew is to first find your particular soapbox issue, and then find a way, no matter how distant, to connect that issue to Michael Andrew. In that way, Andrew becomes the perfect vessel for whatever you want to complain about in swimming at the moment. 

So without further ado, your guide to hating on Michael Andrew:

1. He Doesn't Even Swim Long Races.

Key Talking Points: Tom Jager made his first national cut in the mile! Matt Biondi swam a lot of yards! Michael Phelps focused on longer races before going to shorter ones! ERIK VENDT SWAM 1000x1000 WITH A PARACHUTE ATTACHED TO HIS BACK

Make sure you ignore: That Andrew decided to swim the 400 IM this year again, making a US Open cut in the event. Oh yeah and he's pretty good at short races. 

2. Race pace training is ruining America

Key Talking Points: A wise old swimming man once told me "Work works, do 100x100". When I asked him why he said "GRIT GROWTH MINDSET and because I said so, also work works". I had to take him on this because of his excellent use of buzz words and lack of scientific evidence. Michael Andrew is not following the wisdom of wise old swimming men.

Make sure you ignore: Science

3. Sometimes, MIchael Andrew Swims Not Fast

Key Talking Points: Look at Golden Boy Michael Andrew, he did not swim fast in a swimming race. I always knew he was not a real golden boy like Michael Phelps who never swam bad. His whole life is a failure because of how he swam bad.

Make sure you ignore: All the times he swims really, really fast. 

4. If Michael Andrew is so good, why doesn't he win all the time?

Key Talking Points: Oh man, did you guys see the World Cup where Michael Andrew lost the 100 IM? What a loser. How could he not even win? How dare he call himself a pro when he cannot even win a stupid World Cup 100 IM.

Make sure you ignore: Andrew set a world junior record in the race, swam the same time at 18 that Michael Phelps did at age 26, and lost out to the World Record performance in the event by an elite SCM sprinter in the prime of his career who was implicated in doping prior to the Rio Olympics.

5. Zane Grothe swam lots of meteryards and got faster

Key Talking Points: Wait, why are we talking about Zane Grothe? Oh, because he made a casual reference to increasing his "volume" and then broke some American SCY distance records. Hmmm, maybe I should be listening more to wise old swimming men. "Volume" is good and race pace training is destroying the fabric of American values. Michael Andrew likes race pace. 

Make sure you ignore: Any information from Indiana University coaches about how Zane Grothe trains. Any information about how Zane Grothe trained prior to coming to Indiana University. Above all else, please ignore Mike Westphal. He is not doing anything special, coaching wise.

Let's get back on topic

6. He's Not Swimming in the NCAA and Therefore Will Be A Failure in Life

Key Talking Points: This would be the year that Andrew would have begun college swimming had he not declared himself professional at age 14. Had Andrew not declared pro, he undoubtedly would have been the most prized recruit in his class and gotten a full scholarship wherever.

Except Stanford. It's REALLY HARD TO GET into Stanford.

Hey, Cal is a really good school too!

Stop being elitist, the Honors Program at Aub..

FOCUS GUYS!

Make sure you ignore: That he can still go to college. That Michael Phelps took a long time to finish college. That Missy Franklin threw away some of what would probably be here most lucrative professional swimming years and now her career is probably over. Now I'm sad.

If you have read this far, and skipped the tags and categories for this post, please give them another look before losing your mind. 

Does USA Swimming Want Big Clubs?

Yesterday, USA Swimming announced its Club Excellence Results for 2018. Nations Capital Swim Club led the rankings for fourth consecutive year. 

There are a lot of critics of the rankings. The biggest criticism by far? That the rankings favor not just large clubs, but the biggest of the big. 

I've never coached a true USA Swimming club, and my livelihood doesn't depend on these rankings. But I know a lot of people that do. So I want to examine the purpose that USA Swimming sees behind ranking clubs in this way, and whether the criticisms are fair.

Ranking is Good

First off, let me acknowledge one obvious but probably understated fact. Ranking clubs is the right thing to do for a national governing body like USA Swimming.

I coached club swimming outside of the US in Denmark, and one of my primary frustration was that we didn't even have scored meets. Medal count (1st,2nd and 3rd) was the primary marker for deciding on how clubs stacked up.

Because of this, clubs were motivated to produce "medalists", and in my opinion, less than focused on helping swimmers who were not potential medal winners on the national level.

That medal focus meant a lot of squandered opportunity for Danish swim clubs. What is important in the US context to recognize is that if USA Swimming did nothing to rank clubs, there would still be some ad hoc way that clubs measured themselves against each other, and it would probably be worse (like medal count). So credit to USA Swimming for stepping into the void.

What Do We Want?

USA Swimming has some stated goals for the program. Let's take them one by one:

"Promote the development of strong, well-rounded age group..." Pretty simple, they want to avoid teams focusing on a small number of swimmers. However, the rankings do not account for age whatsoever. The assumption made by USA Swimming is that producing the high level results necessary for scoring in the program is a byproduct of "well rounded age group" training.

"and senior swimming programs that produce elite 18 & under athletes." They also want senior swimming and "elite" junior swimmers. The standards used for scoring are designed for these athletes, with the "gold times" specifically set to international world rankings from the previous year. 

"Provide recognition and resources to motivate and assist member clubs to strive for the highest ideals of athlete performance". They believe these rankings will promote the two above goals.

So Tell Me How It Works Again...

If you're confused, so was I the first 100 times I tried to understand this program. Let me try and give one case of how NCAP got such a high ranking this past year.

The "points" scored are "FINA Points". FINA points are built on a scale where 1000 is equal to a world record swim. So for example, in the 200 Butterfly, a 1000 point swim is 1:51.51, the same as Michael Phelps world record. 

Confusingly, USA Swimming has its own, similar, "power points" system that is not FINA points, which you can find when you do a time search for a swimmer. 

Anyway, one of the biggest reasons NCAP got a high ranking was Sam Pomajevich. The University of Texas freshmen swam a 1:57.62 in the 200 fly this past summer. That swim gave him 852 FINA points.

Because that time also achieved the club excellence "gold" ranking, that total was doubled, meaning Pomajevich scored 1704 points (NCAP's total was 91,597) with just one swim. A swimmer at Pomajevich's level alone can account for tens of thousands of points in this scoring system.

What Does It All Mean?

It's hard to think of a system that doesn't reward club size. Having a large club with large membership, by sheer probability, increases the likelihood of both there being a swimmer like Pomajevich and a lot of swimmers at the senior level who can achieve these time standards. If the rankings were changed to account for "depth", larger swim clubs would likely have an even bigger advantage.

These rankings ought to have more thought, however. Large clubs are definitely a more successful business model, and consolidation is happening because of that. But USA Swimming doesn't need to provide an additional boost of marketing to this end.

Large club size is not how American swimming dominates internationally, in fact it is the inverse. We are dominant because we have many places where excellence can grow, not increasingly fewer, coupled with a huge population base.

Small countries that punch above their weight (Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands) do so because they create an astounding amount of opportunity for both athletes and coaches despite their small population base.

China flounders for its population base because despite a huge investment in outside coaching and chemicals because you have to be elite of the elite to get access to top notch coaching, and there appear to be almost no development or opportunity for domestically born coaches within their system.

Likewise, Russia would probably have some incredible clubs in this ranking system. Their focus on producing "elite" juniors with similar tactics to the Chinese has payed off at the European Junior level. But they are pathetic on the international senior stage, and again must rely heavily on coaches outside of their system to take swimmers to a top international level.

All food for thought as we ponder another year of "club excellence". Do we want big clubs? I say no, and it's up to us to put pressure on USA Swimming to come up with something better.

 

Should We Amputate the Olympics?

Last week, the extremely confusing news that Russia would be banned (kind of, sort of, ok maybe not really banned but we're going to put it in the headlines as banned) from the Winter Olympics broke.

There were a lot of people applauding the decision, including me. Like many of those people, I saw the excellent documentary Icarus . Included in that documentary was a man from the inside of the Russian system telling a lot of us what we already knew: that Russia had state sponsored doping.

I'll admit, I haven't always been with the anti-doping crusaders. I've mocked John Leonard, Craig Lord and others for what I saw as their hysterical takes on doping, specifically as it affects the sport we care about most, swimming.

I'm having Craig Lord on a podcast later this week to discuss this very ban (and hopefully many other things) and what it means.

But for now, I'm left with an incredibly unsettling feeling. Rather than feel comforted by the news out of the IOC, I'm wondering if the Olympics, and how strongly swimming is tied to it, are a recipe for disaster.

It's crazy to say that swimming doesn't need the Olympics. The sport swells to its highest crescendo every four years on the backs of those rings. But there are some serious cracks in the Olympic foundation. 

For one, the IOC and other governing bodies (our lovely FINA, for instance) haven't stood up well against a modern internet age level of scrutiny. So it's hard to credit the IOC for making such an obvious decision. How much more evidence did they need?

I think it's a legitimate question whether swimming should continue to pin its survival to an event organized by crooked plutocrats every four years. With swimmers trying to formalize professional competitive swimming, should we move to abandon ship as a sport before the decision is made for us?

What would we do if suddenly there was no Olympics every four years.? How would we fill that gaping hole? The Winter Olympics is starting to look like a doubtful exercise. How far behind will the summer rendition be?

Would that even work, or given that the corruptive rot extends to FINA as well as NOCs (National Organizing Committees), where do we start running into an organization worth saving in the sport of swimming? 

It's scary to imagine a world without the current organizations that we have, and recreating a lot of the events we love to watch and compete in would not be easy. But we also need to consider whether we've tolerated too many lies in exchange for "nice" swim meets.

How to Do Private Lessons For Year Round Swimmers

Coaching in Denmark was at times the most stressful but also the most fruitful thing I have done in swimming. One experience I am eternally grateful for was the chance to represent Denmark as a coach internationally on three occasions. 

When you're chosen as a coach for one of these teams, you're presented with a challenge. You'll be chosen because you're directly responsible for coaching one or more swimmer on the team. But you'll also be asked to coach swimmers who spend the rest of their year under the guidance of someone else. Beyond just going to the meet, we were also asked to coach swimmers on training camps.

That can basically go one of three ways:

1. You can diverge so greatly, both in terms of stroke feedback and practice type that you severely disrupt what is making the swimmer successful. Egg on your face and an angry coach back home, not to a disappointed and dejected swimmer.

2. You can basically try to be as hands off as possible, give little to no feedback and hope that you don't screw it up.

3. Somewhere in between #1 and #2, you can find a way to help the swimmer in a limited capacity, understanding the limitations of the time you have with them, but also taking the time to figure out what has made them successful up to this point and reinforcing that.

It took me a while to learn #3. I didn't do a very good job the first time I traveled for Denmark. By my third trip, I was getting the hang of it. That experience informs what I do now, which involves private work with swimmers that swim year round.

When you're doing private instruction, it can be tempting to draw contrast between yourself and a swimmers full-time coach. After all, you might assume that swimmers and parents want to see something different from you. You would be wrong.

Swimmers don't benefit from you drawing hard lines between multiple inputs. Instead, you have to find a way to give the swimmer confidence in both the intense instruction you're giving and the team environment they will return to.

I always emphasize to swimmers that I work with that their full-time coaches are responsible for teaching them to do many things right, and I often ask questions to get a sense of the kind of feedback that they may be getting in a team setting that their coach may not have had the time to follow through with them on. 

When you pull this off, the swimmer leaves with more confidence that they are moving forward, but also a renewed faith in the coach they see day in and day out. Even though the swimmers I work with make great strides, I don't publicize who I work with.

When I began this work, I found that in every case coaches were hostile to the idea of someone working privately with their swimmers. I can understand why. Now, I am getting referrals from year round coaches. Why? Because they've realized that I'm just here to help and make them look good in the process.

The best result for me is a swimmer, parent and full-time coach that are all happy with the progress made. I spoke with a parent this morning who credited our private work with her son's renewed commitment to attend morning practice and dedication to his year round team. I'm proud of that- and proud to work in partnership with other coaches.

Are you interested in private instruction that can make a lasting difference in as few as four sessions? Contact me. 

Swimming Myths: Holiday Training and "Mental Toughness"

The holidays are approaching, and all across the country coaches are getting excited. Not for presents underneath the tree, mind you, but for the opportunity that is afforded by the vast majority of American swimmers, who are in some form of school, having a break.

Freed from the shackles of day to day schoolwork, there's an opportunity to train: more, faster, harder. To what extremes varies from coach to coach, but it's often this time of year that I see the type of sets that have no place in the modern swimming world:

12000 IMs (seen in person as recently as 2013)

100x100 (discussed ad nauseum on the internet with plenty of back-slapping)

You don't need more than a couple sets to get my drift do you? My high school swim coach, a person I love and admire, does the dreaded 100x100s around this time of year. I've never been able to convince her not to. I try to keep an open mind to new people I meet who feel these are productive swimming sets, even though I disagree.

There exists absolutely no quantitative evidence for this training whatsoever. Its defenders often fall back on anecdotal or wholly subjective evidence for continuing it.

One of the most frequent anecdotes passed around is the story of Erik Vendt swimming 30x1000 in 2000. While many take away from this story that there is value in insanely long swimming sets, I see it completely differently. To me, this story and the accompanying picture hammers home three things:

1) This type of swimming set can only be justified for the elite of the elite, the .0001 percent of athletes in the sport like Erik Vendt. I have never coached one of those people and very few of us have. 

2) Consent is incredibly important. Erik Vendt did this set when he was 19 years old. He was old enough to ask for it from his coach and do it willingly. I do not believe that 14 year olds can willingly ask for this type of training

3) Phil Spiniello, despite having a very well-shaped bald head, still looks better with hair.

The most maddening and frequent reasoning I see for these types of sets is as follows : that the shared misery of these sets builds "mental toughness".

First, let us rid ourselves of the term "mental toughness" altogether. It's meaning has been so warped and misshapen by false sports masculinity that it has lost most of its tether in reality.

It is used as a catch-all for processes both real and imagined. Swimmers who win are often described as "mentally tough" after the fact. When they're winning, they are "tough". When they lose, all of a sudden not they are not so tough.

When I was a little kid, Mike Tyson looked extremely "mentally tough" until Buster Douglas punched him in the face.

A New Definition

What is it we really want from athletes in our sport? We want resilience in the face of adversity, we want them to thrive and feel real purpose and meaning in what they do. We want them to love to swim.

There are so many ways to build resilience, purpose and positive emotions that do not involve scientifically unsound training that may be effective for only the superhuman outliers on your team. 

Rather than an opportunity for pushing crazy training, the holidays are an opportunity to make more modest adjustments. Swimmers can recover better, and if you do it right, they can emerge from the holiday break refreshed, swimming faster than ever, and with joy to take them through the hard times to come. 

As my colleague Rick Madge and others have pointed out, swimming suffers from a huge survivor bias when it comes to this type of training. The swimmers that can "survive" these types of sets are, like Mike Tyson, described as mentally tough after the fact when they succeed.

We hear about Erik Vendt because he survived. This is another reason to avoid doing this type of training with young kids. Younger kids are very resilient in many ways- that doesn't mean we should force crazy training on them just because they can bounce back.

The biggest problem with building this false sense of resilience is that once the swimmer cannot "survive" this type of training anymore, which comes for many with age, it's absolutely crushing. All across the country, hundreds of college swim coaches, particularly of women, are nodding their heads at that last sentence.

This holiday season, as you head to the pool to train swimmers, think hard about what you are going to do with the opportunity afforded to you.

Give swimmers something challenging, of course, but give them something that lays just beyond their sense of what they can accomplish. Give them something based in scientific evidence so that they can better understand the purpose. Coach them like you would coach yourself.

Happy Chanukah.

Lessons From My Kid: Performance Resistance

Like most parents, I'm proud of my kid. When she accomplishes something for the first time, however ordinary it might be, I get excited.

"Wow she can count past ten now!"

"Did she just use the word excellent? EXCELLENT."

"Awww she said thank you without me even having to ask."

What naturally followed is, however boring it might be for other people, I wanted them to witness the breathtaking progress of learning that I was seeing. So I would ask my daughter to perform, not in so many words, but basically try to trick her into showing off her skills.

She wouldn't. The second she realized that "Dad" was putting her on display, she resisted swiftly. With a wry smile, she'd give the wrong answer, or ignore me altogether. What's up with that?

Jumping in

Now, I happen to be smart enough that I have contracted out teaching my own daughter to swim. She's been taking swimming lessons for a couple of months now, and is just starting to get a little independence around the water.

A couple weekends ago, she jumped from the side of the pool into the water unassisted. I tried to remain composed on the outside, but on the inside I felt pretty much like Chad LeClos' dad in 2012:

My daughter was excited too, but not for the same reason. She just knew that she had been scared but tried something new and it all worked out.

The next weekend being Thanksgiving, there were no swim lessons. I thought to myself- "she's making progress, I should take to her to the pool to reinforce that".

I told her we would go swim together. She was excited. I said "we can practice jumping into the water!" in my best excited dad voice.

Her face turned. "I don't want to go to the swimming pool daddy" she said looking at the floor. I didn't get it at first. Slowly it crept up on me- she instinctively felt that our trip to the pool had turned into another performance. 

I course corrected: "let's go to the pool and play". The response was a resounding "YAY!!!". We drove over and I decided to just get in the water with her and see what happened.

There were other kids there. One of them strode confidently to the side of the pool and jumped into the water, popping up with a wide grin.

"Can I do that daddy?" my daughter asked. I stifled myself, then responded, "yes, of course".

She must have jumped into the water 20 times or more.

Not Only Parents

I know what you're expecting now. There's an obvious lesson for parents here, I can't deny that. Kids want you to be their parent, period, and you should be so lucky to have them remind you of that.

There's a lesson for coaches as well. Yes, our job does involve the performance of athletes, that is unavoidable. But even our non-related "kids" that toil back and forth in the water for us should naturally push back against coaches putting performance first and relationship second. 

No one wants to feel that they are a collection of performances, because everyone has good and bad days, and we all fail many times on our way to success. 

I'll try to remember that when I'm back watching someone else teach the swim lesson this Saturday, but also when I'm the one delivering the instructions to someone else's kid on Sunday.

Why This Blog Exists

Why am I doing this? It's a question you should ask often when you repeat activities over and over again. Habits can form, and that can be a good thing, but it can also be the way you get stuck in a rut.

As we approach the end of the year, I'm asking myself that question with regard to this blog. Why am I writing it? Here are the big reasons:

1. I love to write and it's my preferred method for interacting with other coaches. I love starting a discussion via blog and hearing from other coaches

2. I love swimming. It's a beautiful sport that I carry with me in everything else I do. 

3. I love coaching and coaches, and the powerful influence coaches wield. The best and worst influences I have had in my life (outside of my own parents) have been coaches. 

4. I think that Positive Psychology is still in its infancy in terms of being understood and implemented in the sports world. I would like to see that grow

5. I have built a business around the first four and I would like people to know about it.

The Harsh Truth

Here's something else you can expect from this blog: honesty. There are two things that are true about honesty.

One is that most people value it. The other is that somebody who is being a total jerk will usually say "I'm just being honest" in their defense.

To the latter, I know that my honesty often stings, and sometimes that makes me a jerk. In the past week I've heard someone tell me they are glad for the podcast because they can tell (and I'm paraphrasing) that I'm not as big of a jerk as they thought once they heard my voice.

I heard another coach (Steve Schaffer) respond to my post about the prevalence of the kind of coaching tactics that got Rutgers coach Petra Martin removed. Schaffer, who always tells me when he disagrees with something I wrote (which is what I like about him), said I should be "careful about painting with broad strokes".

So why do I do it? Because I'd like to see coaching in the sport I love get better. I know that occasionally I'm going to over the line and make some people extremely defensive in the process. Just like training in the pool, it's impossible to know where the line is without going over it.

Finally, rather than pointing the finger, I acknowledge that I am part of swimming and the swim coaching community. I am part of what must get better, and I hope that being honest about what I have learned and experienced I can help others get better too.

Want to know more? Write me!

The Line Between Humility and Modesty

I have to admit, that as of a few weeks ago, I didn't really understand what humility and modesty really meant. I thought of them as synonyms and I used them as such:

"Don't be so humble." I would admonish a swimmer for downplaying their accomplishment.

"You're being modest." were my words for a colleague that didn't mention their success.

It wasn't until a few weeks ago, while at a conference, that an aggressive but well intentioned man approached me after I spoke and blew me up. "It's ok to be humble, but you're being modest and it's a problem.".

I took a big gulp and mumbled "can you tell me more about that?" even though what I really wanted to do was get as far away from his critique as I possibly could.

Impostor Syndrome and Self-Promotion

At various stages of our lives, we hear that we must become skilled self-promoters. The first time I can remember being pressed like that was applying to college. It made me deeply uncomfortable. "SELL YOURSELF" was a weird piece of advice that I got over and over again.

When I fully moved to adulthood, I heard a version of the same when it came to applying for jobs. I labored over cover letters and resumes. How could I convince people I would be great for their job without being a lying braggart.

I struggle with something that I think most every person does. Impostor syndrome is that little voice in the back of your head that seeds doubt in your very real accomplishments. It can tell you to be modest- to hold back some of your best qualities and accomplishments as if they aren't real.

The Absence of Exaggaration

Humility, I learned, is something else altogether. Some of the most wildly self-promotional, confident or even trash-talking people I can think of are actually quite humble. Let me explain.

Humility is knowing who you are, and who you are not. It's the lack of false confidence. Garrett McCaffrey termed Lily King the "Larry Bird of Swimming" and the analogy couldn't fit better. Both back up their talk- there's nothing false about what they say.

When Larry Bird announced to other competitors in the inaugural three point contest that they were playing for second place, he was right. 

False Modesty

Modesty is, I've come to understand, false by definition. Imagine if, asked if he was a good shooter, Larry Bird had said "I'm alright". That would be modest of him to say, just as it would if Caeleb Dressel described his start as "pretty good" or Greg Meehan commented that recruiting at Stanford is "going well."

Not admitting that you've done something great doesn't serve others either. Again, imagine again the hypothetical of Caeleb Dressel with a "pretty good" start. What does that leave your average age grouper thinking about their ability off the blocks?

Humility, knowing who you are and what you have accomplished and presenting it without embellishment, is admirable. It's a virtue. Crossing the line and downsizing your accomplishments doesn't serve you or others. When it comes to it, draw the line at humility.