Here’s How I Would Refresh Grass Roots Swimming (A Whole New Format)

I’m going to relaunch swimming.

A post by long time USA Swimming insider John Bradley on Facebook about how swimming hasn’t launched a “major refresh” since the 1980s has inspired me.

My league won’t be geared toward the Olympics. It won’t even be geared toward the NCAA. It will be geared 100% toward creating a fun product that I can convince parents to put their kids in. It will be a complement to the ‘serious swimming’ that we’re all so concerned about; you know, the one that makes swimmers smarter and more prepared for the real world that we all gush about. It will be the place that serious swimmers go to enjoy swimming and maybe serious soccer players go to get a little off-season change of pace.

The Format

Events:

Each meet will be a pentathlon. The season will oscillate between distances. Some weeks it will be 50s, some weeks 100, maybe even 150s or 200s in some weeks.

• Fly
• Back
• Breast
• Free
• IM

Every swimmer will enter every event.

Scoring:

We will use modified cross country scoring. For those unfamiliar, in cross country, time doesn’t really matter, place does. The first place finisher gets 1 point, 2nd gets 2 points, 3rd gets 3 points, and so on. The top 5 runners on each team get points, while 6 and 7 are “pushers.” That means they don’t score points, but they can displace the 5th place finishers from other squads if you have a deep team. Lowest score wins.

I think for this system to work, we’d either need to go broader or deeper. Maybe 4 teams, 10 scorers per team, with 4 “pushers” per team, or 10 teams, 6 scorers + 2 pushers per team.

Ranking is done based on the OVERALL pentathlon score for the meet, not the placing in each event (though I kind of would want to experiment with both sides).

Then there would be bonus points for “specialists.” Top 3 finishers in each event receive -1, -2, or -3 points for their team.

We can quibble and fine-tune the details, but on a blank slate, with a bunch of athletes who haven’t been told that they just aren’t a breaststroker, I think this becomes really fun.

Make this a 12 & under league. At 13 you’ve gotta get serious. 12 & under you can have fun, do age groups (or even single age).

The Pros and Cons

This is what I thought of being critical of my own idea. I’m sure y’all have more. Let me have them.

Pros:

• Much simpler structure to the meets. Every kid swims every event, heat and lane assignments stay consistent.
• More compact events.
  • Eliminating 13+, and making the construction of the meet less complex, means more efficiency.
  • This structure allows ‘more teams’ to participate, which allows you to shrink the individual teams, and give them a better ‘team’ feel. 20 kids per age group, wrap it up.
  • Using current age group structures, that’s 4 age groups. That means 40 total events. If you have 14 kids participating on each team in a dual meet format, that’s 560 swims. In an 8 lane pool, that’s 70 heats. So for 50s/100 IM, you’re in and out in 90 minutes, give or take. Maybe you blend, set up a 2 hour format, some weeks fly is the 100s, some week breast is the 100s, some weeks backstroke is the 100s, etc.
• Every swimmer contributes to the team. You don’t have 14 heats of 50 frees with kids who (whether you think you’ve convinced them or not) at some point figure out they aren’t scoring points for the team.
  • If you have 20 on the team in each age group, minus absences, every one of those 20 kids matter.
• Allows kids to be good at different things and still contribute
• It creates ‘back of the pack’ battles that makes every swimmer more engaged for the whole meet
• Live scoreboard is a necessity

Cons/Hurdles/Questions:

• How do you structure practice time in limited pool space? Do you have one set of coaches who coach multiple teams?
• Doesn’t feel like it gears purely toward the Olympic pipeline
  • But we don’t know that it doesn’t. If it keeps more top-class athletes in the sport for longer, maybe there’s a tradeoff
  • Or maybe putting 10 year olds in two-a-day practices year round isn’t actually the best way to produce Olympians
• “I WON MY RACE” loses a bit of its excitement
• You probably need more officials
• It would be a paradigm shift for current large summer league teams
• By eliminating the older age groups, you lose one of my favorite parts of summer league, which is a 6 year old and an 18 year old scoring the same number of points for the same team. Maybe you figure out a way to roll the 13-18 year old swimmers back in in some more compact way.
• You could still run a big “all teams” championship, but you make the qualification based on regular season. So the championship is a little longer – I don’t think that offends anybody.

There it is. That’s my idea. I’ve made it free to you all. Someone turn it into a business. Who wants to run this experiment with me? Maybe somewhere where the summer leagues end in June, we could run a four week pilot program in July. Pull together 6 teams, let’s do it.

We’ll need a committee to iron out the details. That committee should include only a few swim coaches, nobody with any Olympic or collegiate swimming experience, maybe some little league coaches, maybe someone’s crazy uncle, maybe those coaches on every summer league team who never did any version of swimming besides summer league but stuck with it until they were 18 and were given a job for summers when they were home from college because they’re kind of the ‘spirit of the team.’

I’m ready. Are you?