Kyle Cameo: How to Make Your Dual Meets More Exciting (Without Blowing Up Your Budget)

Kyle Sockwell is the reigning king of the swimming hype machine. As part of his national dual meet tour. With only two stops left (huge rivalry meets on January 25th between Tennessee and Georgia and February 8th for Arizona vs Arizona State), he’s learned a lot about how to make college dual meets more exciting – and has had a ton of success at turning bodies out to sit in the stands.

Kyle Sockwell‘s Dual Meet Tour Attendance to Date:

• UNCW vs. Duke (cancelled, but sold out)
• Howard vs. Georgetown – 1,012
• Minnesota vs. Army – 1,058
• Wisconsin vs. Minnesota – 968
• Notre vs. Louisville (women only) – 461 (previous venue ‘capacity’ was 400)
• Army vs. Navy – 1,311

I wanted to tap into those experiences and figure out what was working. Obviously his starpower and social media presence drove bodies out – but what was making the energy at those meets.

Kyle and I put our heads together and came up with six great ways to make your next dual meet even better.

There are definitely some big, expensive, complicated things that you can do to make college swim meets better. But there are also a few low-hanging fruit that provide a massive ROI and don’t take a lot of work to get right.

Don’t be afraid to tap into athletic department human resources. Yes, they are all there for football and basketball, but if you ask enough people. You never know who might get really excited at the idea of DJ’ing a swim meet and showing off their sick new playlist, or who on the team might have a friend that is trying to build a DJ career.

Most importantly, some of these are things you can handle right now. Like, in time for your dual meet next week.

Kyle’s 3:

1 – Treat Your Dual Meet Like a Radio Show

It might seem odd, but I think about an event (in this case, a dual meet) by breaking it down into each sensory experience for a fan: hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste.

Maximizing positive experiences for a fan in each of these categories should be the goal, but for now, let’s focus on the audio side of things.

Imagine you’re two hours into a ten-hour road trip, listening to the radio, in a groove, and then it goes completely silent. No music, no commentary, no talk show—nothing. Just dead air. If you’re anything like me, your first thought would be, “Is the radio broken?” Your first action would likely be to adjust the volume or change the channel to check.

As I’ve stood on pool decks across the country this year, one thing has become clear: our dual meets are often too quiet or entirely silent—an obvious and easy fix.

As the DJ at a dual meet, your job is to allow for brief moments of silence after building anticipation to the “quiet for the start.” Then, if your team permits playing music during races, play it loud enough to take some pressure off the audience to create the environment with their own voices.

Pro Tip: It’s much easier for fans to be loud in an already loud environment.

As the announcer, if all you hear is water sounds while you’re eating a sandwich, you’ve essentially lulled the audience to sleep. Some people even pay monthly for apps that play water sounds to help them sleep. Your job is to keep the audience engaged with your voice and insights.

Pro Tip: Updating the crowd on the team score or reminding them how scoring works during a longer race is a great way to keep fans engaged without getting to repetitive.

2 – Give Fans a Reason to Show Up

One of the easiest ways to engage and rally an audience is by providing a reason to attend a dual meet. With that being said, just “having a meet” isn’t typically enough to convince a large audience to take time out of their busy lives.

Keep in mind, that we’re asking fans to dedicate about half a day to attend a dual meet. For a 6:00 PM meet, fans may leave an hour before the event, spend three hours at the meet, and then take another hour to return home. That’s roughly five hours.

Unfortunately, our swim meets don’t impact the postseason or overall season outcome (unlike many other major sports), which means we need to be more creative.

Low-hanging fruit:

• Gamifying Attendance: The swimming community is well aware of the current climate in the NCAA regarding non-revenue sports. One positive aspect of this reality is that they have demonstrated their willingness and readiness to stand up, show up, and support new ideas. After speaking to hundreds, if not thousands, of fans this year, another insight emerged: our fans are not in a “one and done” mindset when it comes to attending dual meets. If they attend a meet, see that we’re making an effort, and find it falls short of their expectations, they are still willing to return as we try to create more exciting environments. We have an amazing fan base that is begging for more reasons to engage with the sport consistently.
• Suit up to swim fast: Swimming fans enjoy watching people swim fast and love knowing that a record could potentially get broken. I have an unbelievable amount of data to support this and the quicker we accept that reality the better. This isn’t the cheapest thing on the list, but if you’ve been saving last year’s suits for a special occasion – this is it.

Bigger ideas:

• Meet & greets with high-level swimmers: Engage parents, club swimmers, and alumni by allowing them to interact with top-tier athletes. A meet-and-greet opportunity could push fans on the fence about showing up to a meet over the edge and get them in the venue.
• Tailgates and pre-/post-meet events: Adding optional activities before and after meets can create more value for a fans’ time. Tailgating has long been a tradition in swimming (I’m not claiming to be inventing the wheel here) and leaning into it responsibly can enhance the overall experience of attending a meet. Ask your parent group to drive the bus on this one – I promise your team has one parent who has been looking for a reason to start a party.

3 – Prioritize Displaying the Live Score

I was at a bar recently with former swimmers talking about the lack of live scoring in swimming. We joked about how absurd this would be in other sports, but then the conversation shifted to disappointment when we realized how lame it is that this is still a reality in swimming. One specific comment stuck with me:

“When we were swimming [in college], I didn’t even know if we were winning because there was no way for us to check the score.”

This sentiment, shared by a group of former Division I power-conference swimmers, highlights a critical issue. Without live scoring, fans, swimmers, and even coaches often feel lost, which for fans specifically can discourage them from returning.

To create a welcoming environment, we need to help fans understand the sport. Imagine watching a college volleyball game without visible scoring, only to have the game end abruptly. That’s what happens in college swimming—but often, we don’t even know who won

If you don’t have a digital scoreboard that can do this, find a local club swimmer and give them a whiteboard and a dry erase marker. It’s not slick, but it’s a start!

Braden’s 3:

4 – Fog Machines

Drexel University head coach Nathan Lavery has been texting me weekly updates on his experimentation with fog machines. I assumed he must have borrowed one from the basketball team, but it turns out he bought a water-based one for about $30 from Aldi.

He’s got it dialed in too. Most pools have a ready room (or a spare equipment closet), and you can have the swimmers emerge from fog.

Coach Lavery says that the key is to test it out before hand and experiment, because it gets effected by air flow.

Does it sound over the top? Yes. But if this is a business, it’s an entertainment business. It always sounds over the top when you’re behind the curtain.

And this one isn’t just for the fans – if you wanna see your swimmers get hyped up and locked in for a dual meet race, save the preworkout, give them a fog machine and a walkout sound.

This is collegiate athletics. It shouldn’t feel like a high school dual meet. These little touches elevate everyone’s energy.

5 – Call and Response Cheers

This one takes some coordination, but figure out a simple cheer that your swimmers can do call-and-response with the fans. This gives folks in the stands the sense that they’re actively engaging with the athletes. It’s like at the end of the game when the fans and the football team all sing the same fight song together. This is the illusion of sports – no fans refer to their team as “they,” they refer to the team as “we,” if the fans feel part of the “we,” they’ll feel that their presence is important and they’ll return.

6 – Livestreams

Technology in this arena boomed during the pandemic. Given what Jeremy Abreu has been able to pull off at small meets around the Northeast…you can do it too. I promise your school has as many resources as some of these places do.

There are great plug-and-play systems, even easy ‘insert a scoreboard’ features. Check Reddit for lots of ideas how to make this work. Assign it to an assistant coach as a project.

But if nothing else works, find a good high vantage point with an iPad and a tripod and point it at the pool to stream on YouTube and post that YouTube link all over your team’s social media channels. Start somewhere, and build off it for next season. The hardest step can be the first one. It doesn’t have to be a big one.