At 7:30 in the morning on any given Saturday, there are hundreds of club swimmers getting ready to jump into a crowded pool for meet warmup. They’ll swim fingers-to-toes with their teammates. Eventually, the session will start and for the coaches, swimmers, parents, and officials will settle in for hours in a hot, packed pool deck where there are 20 heats of the girls 11-12 50 freestyle. Then, they’ll wake up and do it all again on Sunday.
If you have ever been involved in club swimming, this is probably a familiar scene. And it’s one that former U.S. National Team Director Frank Busch is working hard to change.
Busch has teamed up with ASCA to lead a new Club Success Initiative “aimed at supporting clubs and empowering coaches.” One of the major ways that Busch wants to do that is by reimagining how club swim meets are run.
His aim is to make the meet sessions go faster while still keeping them profitable for the clubs. In our conversation, he outlines the four key stakeholders for any club team—athletes, parents, coaches, club administration—and discusses the ways that avoiding hours-long sessions benefits the separate groups of stakeholders.
Each set of stakeholders have different priorities. Athletes want to have fun and get faster. Parents want both of those things for their children, but also aren’t always excited about spending 12 hours of their weekend sitting on bleachers or volunteering as timers. Coaches want to empower their athletes and receive their salaries. Club administrators want to make money to keep the club running and grow its good reputation.
The trend of rethinking meets is sweeping through the NCAA. The Battle of the Burr, a meet between Howard and Georgetown, kicked off this wave of excitement about how to energize meets and attract a crowd. We’ve seen schools like Texas, Virginia, and UNC-Wilmington follow suit and put their own spin on dual meets by testing nontraditional formats, DJs, and super-finals.
Through his partnership with ASCA, Busch spent the fall of 2023 speaking with club teams about implementing his ideas. I spoke with him before the majority of his engagements. He was happy with how his ideas had been received by the clubs he’d already spoken with. He also wanted to keep most of the specifics of his plans limited to his speaking engagements as they change depending on the club he addresses. Regardless, it’s clear that like NCAA swimming, club swimming is approaching a watershed moment.
But Busch is choosing to focus his attention on club swimming because of the youth market, “My biggest concern is the youth market and how to market the sport for people that want to be a part of it,” he says.
Busch cites the decrease in registered swimmers and clubs across USA Swimming as something that worries him. The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences are playing a role in those numbers, but Busch still believes that there is a youth market out there to bring into the sport.
Swimming is a unique sport for a lot of reasons. At the club level, girls and boys train together and multiple age groups get to see each other, which isn’t true for all youth sports. But as he points out, the time commitment of the current club swimming structure can make it a difficult commitment for families. “If it’s the choice between a two-day meet and a two-hour basketball game, I’m picking the basketball game every time,” he says, “and that’s before you get into the affordability of it all.”
“It’s about recruiting and retaining athletes,” he says, adding that “something has to change, club swimming has to realize that and adjust.”
As someone who’s been involved in the swimming world for the majority of his life, Busch knows how special this sport can be. And now, he wants to give back to “the sport that’s given [him] so much” by thinking about how to get the next generation involved.
Club swimming needs to figure out how to adapt itself to continue to appeal to kids across the country. There are many moving parts to this type of change like increasing diversity, access to pools, marketing, and retention.
Busch’s goal with making club meets run faster is to reduce the time commitment but also increase the amount of time that kids spend actually swimming while at the meet. His hope is that changes like that will improve the club swimming experience for all the stakeholders involved in a club and help grow the sport that has given him so much.
We need more dual meets and team focused events. Swimming is individual and that is less likely to cause but in. High school swimming is so popular because meets are two hours. Swimmers are part of a team and each member matters.
Meh. This isn’t the 1970/80s and meets don’t last that long anymore. My kids swim Sat and Sun morning, usually from 8-12. That’s one meet a month. The time commitment is minimal, comparatively, and I want them to get rest between events.
I don’t mind it much either – but I suspect those of us commenting on SS are not the ordinary novice swim parents. And not the target audience for these adjustments. 8 hours in one weekend is a massive time commitment – especially if you have 2 other kids doing 2 other sports.
We want to pitch our sport to newbies – not just hang onto the diehards. I applaud these changes.
“Have your 10 & unders go 45 in the 100 free like the college kids. The meet will go faster.
Now give me $5,000”
-frank
I think a march madness or a bracket style H2H competition would be fun. Each team rosters 24 athletes total and does a H2H. Teams with most wins get a playoff birth.
Then athletes, coaches, team and individual skills matter.
Meets will go faster and now it feels more like a team sport.
Why would I pay Busch some of our meet income to make a meet go faster? Any coach with some intelligence can cap their meet entries, run a shorter event meet lineup, and have the thing wrapped up in roughly 2-3 hours tops.
I do agree we need much more of this for our foundational/age group kids. However, there is no need to make Busch the middle man.
Tell him we want his kids out of the sport of swimming
It’s probably why he has so much free time to do this now. He’s not doing behind the scenes damage control anymore.
Forgot the most important stakeholder. The facility. Not all programs have their own pool to run meets so have to pay rent at county, city, campus or other local facilities to host. This impacts bottom line for clubs which then pushes them toward the magical four hour session. You can run smaller meets, but then you have to run more…but the rent isn’t changing
If Frank Busch is involved, there’s a money grab for him somewhere. Facts.
Working for free is not the way to go.