The annual Collegiate Swimming & Diving Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) meetings took place over the weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. Retired University of Michigan softball coach Carol Hutchins, the winningest head coach in NCAA Division I Softball history, was the keynote speaker.
The conference, an opportunity for coaches to network, included a breakout session of NCAA Division I coaches in attendance that has so far created the most buzz out of the weekend.
One of the big takeaways from these conversations is that there is widespread agreement that the NCAA Championships won’t be going back to Pacific Time anytime soon after several teams struggled with the long travel and time zone changes. Federal Way, which faced several technical challenges besides being at the Northwestern tip of the west coast, was especially derided.
Besides technical challenges, Pacific time made for very late sessions in the Central and Eastern United States, where most of the top teams are.
Part of the challenge comes from Federal Way being the only championship-caliber indoor venue in the Mountain or Pacific time zones right now. While far more of the top collegiate programs are in the Central or Eastern time zones, it seems equitable for them to not have to travel every year, but the facility availability in the western U.S. don’t support that right now.
This conversation has reportedly been had at the highest levels of the NCAA, including the board.
Most of the conversation has been around how to improve the viewability and fan interest in swimming, which extends the conversations that are being had every day on social media.
The breakout lasted about 90 minutes.
Key takeaways:
- Top mid-major programs continue to advocate for championship access via automatic qualifiers. One of the more interesting points they made is that mid-major swimmers can be active fans and drive ratings – one coach said his team watched NCAA Championships when they had a swimmer there, but not when they didn’t.
- One mid-major assistant coach was vocal about working to get more eyes on dual meets (which made huge strides forward last season thanks to Kyle Sockwell’s efforts, among others’), especially for those teams that don’t have real NCAA Championship hosts for most of their teams.
- To their credit, most of the more-vocal mid-major coaches are the coaches who are investing a ton of personal energy into generating more exposure for their teams and their programs, so they are ‘walking the walk.’ Some of that energy from the mid-major level could be a good addition to the ivory towers of the biggest programs, if it can be worked out the right way.
- One Power 5 associate head coach talked about athlete stories being important because that can gain a lot of exposure and those individual stories can generate a lot of interest. That associate head coach, ironically, comes from a program that has historically not been very media friendly – though that may not be a culture that the associate head coach has set.
- There seemed to be widespread agreement that the sport “fumbled” on telling the story of Gretchen Walsh and using it as a springboard for growth (ala Caitlin Clark).
- The CSCAA is going to talk to ESPN about whether they find more value in the individual successes or the team successes, so that the sport has some guidance on where to focus energy.
- Diving continues to ask for more exposure, plus platform and team diving events. The message back is that ESPN is currently less interested in diving than it is swimming.
- One head coach of a top 10 program brought up the idea of going to 12 athlete teams for championship meets. With roster limits and increasingly-imbalanced resources among programs, this could create more parity among the less-endowed teams that aren’t able to compete with the 22-deep squads at places like Texas.
Mid major assist coach who article mentioned was advocating for dual meets.
Point I was making or trying to make was there is all this talk about how to format NCAAs to make it more tv friendly does not matter. It’s 1 meet each year. You don’t build casual fans by having 1 meet on tv a year. There need to be a dual meet on ESPN every week. It doesn’t have to be any mid majors. It can uva vs nc state one week. Then Indiana vs noter dame the next the Louisville vs Kentucky the next. Having them be big school rivalries will help being in people too. It’s simpler to adjust your dual meet format to make… Read more »
And I think it’s worth acknowledging how hard CSCAA leadership pushed back on your ideas, especially given your background. I won’t elaborate unless you want to identify it, but I think it’s worth acknowledging that even as a mid-major assistant coach, you bring a background and experience that maybe some top power 4 head coaches don’t have, and that should be valued.
Appreciate the kind word Braden! I don’t comment often on here but I have been using the Fly and die name on here since I was in college and would like to keep it at lease decently anonymous. Even if people in the room who know me yesterday will know who this name is now.
I will say after the session I did follow up with leadership with a more 1 on 1 conversation and they were receptive and told me to email them my ideas. They are definitely working hard to change. But change is hard and that reflexive adverse reaction to anything changing in swimming is definitely real. There is nothing wrong with that. But We as a… Read more »
If you reduce the championship scoring roster to 12, guess what the new team roster limit will be from the Conferences and Athletic Directors? Exactly 12
You have no idea the extent of damage this would do to the entire sport! Please for the love of god do not talk about this “proposal” any more! You will give athletic directors some ideas!
And if you doubt this would happen, just remember what college sports is looking like and who is now running the entire operations. It’s MBA/VC bros. Which means everything is purely numbers and if you can win a championship by paying 12 great athletes instead of 30 or 24 then guess which option those bros are going to choose? Don’t give them any more wiggling room for roster reductions, period! Full Stop!
Sure it wouldn’t happen to all teams but you better believe that a lot of athletic departments are chomping at the bit to cut costs at any given chance.
Sorry, I’ll step off this little soapbox but this proposal terrifies me in terms of the unintended consequences.… Read more »
All you have to do to understand the East Coast / West Coast positions on holding the meet in the West is look at the location of the meeting: Raleigh, North Carolina. Folks looking after their personal interests, not the sport’s interests. If the event was held in San Diego the attitudes might have been different.
NCAA coaches: don’t fall for the trap. If you change the roster cap for NCAAs to 12, it will only be a matter of time until roster limits are reduced to 15.
Great point and even a better reason to drop the NCAA roster cap to 10 with roster limits at 15! NOW you are onto something great.
>The message back is that ESPN is currently less interested in diving than it is swimming.
Is that even possible?
I know lots of divers that don’t tune in for diving at ncaas, I know lots of swimmers that do tune in for swimming. So yea, very possible. The average person only cares about these sports at the Olympics and there are way more swimmers/swim fans than divers
I definitely agree with your latter points.
I found the whole article grimly humorous. Lots of ideas on how to improve the viewability of swimming & diving, with the biggest idea seemingly being “don’t hold events on the West Coast.”
Personally, I believe the viewers who ignore swimming at 9:00 p.m. Eastern are the same ones who will ignore swimming at 6:00 p.m. Eastern.
If Eastern/Central teams feel like they shouldn’t have to travel to the West Coast, so be it but don’t pretend it has to do with viewership. In the end, it’s swimmers swimming back and forth between two ends of the pool. Either you want to watch that or you don’t.
I’m invested in the sport as a fan and I found staying up for results to be difficult. Especially when you have work the next day. Saturday might not be as bad but Wednesday and Thursday aren’t fun.
The Gretchen Walsh story is FABULOUS! While SWIMMING might have missed the boat of exciting the masses over her amazing rise, AMERICA just does not care about the NCAA sport in its current state.
It is hilarious to read the pundits ideas on what we missed or what we can do to invigorate (resuscitate) swimming and diving.
Perhaps we should consider putting the sport to bed, turn off the lights and redesign the tasteless menu with revolutionary, earth shattering ideas which heretofore have been dismissed, ignored or unimagined by the ultra-intelligent coaches, omnisient “swim gurus” and “experts” Youse guys and gals have been merchants of deterioration for the past 50 years.
OR it will be fun (so,… Read more »
Finals and at least some percentage of big competitions should be in LCM because no one, particularly non-swimmers, likes watching competitive dolphin kicking.
SCM is the right thing for Div 1 champs. All the excitement of short course with the ability to set world records.
Or better yet, market SCY times as World Records, since…they basically are
It was right when they did SCM in Olympic years. Whomever put the kabosh on that after two efforts (2000, 2004, I think) was not thinking clearly.
You had teams who didn’t have regular access to meters so it was kind of unfair to them. It also basically threw out the record book every four years when the meet was in meters. No possibility of breaking the yards meet or NCAA records at the premier event. Teams also didn’t necessarily know how to compare their yard and meters times. American college swimming is geared for yards. Doing meters was a nice experiment worth trying but it was more trouble than it was worth.
No everyone has a long course pool to train in. And not everyone can even train SCM. It usually depends on your bulkhead setup although some schools still just have a yards pool. If we had finished the move to metric, SCM would be a valid wish at this point. But we’re still building pools to compete in yards. Aside from world records, it doesn’t seem to matter. Foreign athletes with regular access to SCM and LCM at home still come here to swim in college. NCAA champs is still one of, if not the, most exciting meets of the year.
A lot of teams don’t have access to LCM pools. So what? I spent years at a Gold Medal club that didn’t have even diving blocks, let alone a 50-meter pool, and we didn’t cry about fairness. Besides, there isn’t a single team who is actually competing for a national title that lacks access to a 50 meter pool.
I do like the idea of SCM as a compromise, since I think there is something to the argument about the exciting environment you create when you pack so many people in around a small pool. This has always been something NCAAs has always had over the Olympics.
because watching beautiful technique is so boring <sarcasm>
If you actually cared about beautiful swimming technique, you’d be advocating for the format that actually showcases beautiful swimming technique for most of the swim, instead of SCY which is 2/3 dolphin kicking in most events.
I might be misinterpreting the rationale for this discussion, and I know Federal Way didn’t execute the meet in the best way, but teams like Stanford, Cal, USC, Arizona, ASU, etc. have had to travel to the east coast for NCAAs for years, but they return the favor to the east coast teams one time and now it’s an issue? Sometimes you just have to adapt to the circumstances.
If you want to move the sport forward in terms of visibility and tv viewership and such, starting finals at 9pm east coast time isn’t going to work.
That and Federal Way’s air exchanger issues never seem to end.
Having it at Texas or Texas A&M seems like the best option to accommodate the most in terms of Travel.
The meet has probably outgrown Texas A&M at this point unless they get creative with temporary stands. Having the extra indoor 25 yard pool would be nice, though.
IUPUI is always a good option if available. Not as bad as the far coasts
IUPUI is hit/miss. If it fills it’s electric. I can’t think of the last time it filled for anything, which can leave it feeling cavernous.
For me, Texas, Minnesota, Georgia Tech would be the three pool rotation. Nice pools, fairly easy to get to, good environment, and they offer a little bit more context than Indy and Greensboro for anyone who doesn’t want to just swim meet-nap-swim meet-nap for 5 days in a row.
I still think we need a 3,000 seat pool with seating on both sides in a good small-medium sized city. Feels like something Dallas would build, except for Dallas not having a D1 swim team. We needed a Dallas-hosted Olympics.
except for Dallas not having a D1 swim team? SMU? TCU?
TCU is in Ft. Worth but yeahhhhh I blanked on SMU. My B.
I’m not sure people have gotten over the debacle with the pool length in 2008-2009. A&M has put in to host NCAAs again several times and not gotten a whiff of interest. They have their technical issues but there is a group of teams that enjoy going there for a good meet. Just don’t see them hosting NCAAs anytime soon.
A&M actually has hosted the NCAAs since the bulkhead issue – they had back to back womens and men’s meets in 2009. They are NOT interested in hosting NCAAs – they actually asked to pass on their next scheduled time to host SECs so instead of hosting in 2028 it will return to Georgia that year.
The bulkhead issue popped up the season they hosted NCAAs. It first happened at a Grand Prix meet the May before when athletes who qualified for Trials at the meet were entered for Trials at the cut. Then it happened again at the Art Adamson meet the November before they hosted NCAAs. It’s why they paid their old director who moved to UT to come back in and be there for the meet. They haven’t hosted NCAAs since. And Steve and Jay told me they had tried several times since then to get the meet.
It’s a valid point, but the time difference is brutal when NCAA always starts the meet at the same time locally. When other sports go west for championships, they are able to adjust the time so that the rest of the country can watch. The Super Bowl always starts about 6:30pm EST no matter where it’s played. The NCAA basketball championship always starts about 9pm EST, which isn’t early but the point is still the same. The NCAA meet always starts about 7pm local. That really is brutal when you are talking about 7pm pacific and you live on the east coast. It is something the committee should look at. Can they adjust the start time, even if just by… Read more »