The Swim Brief

Neverwet: The Product That Could Ruin 2012 Olympic Swimming!

2012-02-20T12:20:00.000-08:00

I had two girls standing side by side in LZR Elites this weekend, and one had water beading on it while the other didn't. One was straight out of the box, and the other had been worn for one previous meet. They oughtta last longer than that... wouldn't you agree? They still have great compression after a few swims, but the kids know there is a difference between new and used tech, even after the days of neoprene.

Fabric has to be permeable to get the FINA tag on the butt, and once it has that tag nobody questions whether the suit is legal or not. But what if you could find a permeable fabric that could be made water repellent after purchase? Admit it. Everyone out there knows at least one person who smelled like Rain-X at the big meet. People have tried it... trust me.

Well, believe it or not, the day has not just come... Science has done better than we could have imagined. Nanotechnology has evolved to the point that now electronics and even fabrics can be made not just waterproof, but SUPERHYDROPHOBIC. There is a big difference between those two terms. I think the big meet just added a new step in preparation: taper down, shave down, suit up, spray up.

Watch these videos and then please reassure me that FINA is already developing a test for this. You will see that it does not limit itself to fabric... it works on skin as well. And it is not that you just don't get wet: Water apparently just moves out of your way. It is invisible and it will be on the market soon. I am absolutely certain that I am not the first person to have looked into this. I guarantee that as soon as Yahoo! News broke the story that there will soon be a spray that can waterproof an iphone, all those coaches out there smarter than me were on it and probably got a foot in the door to get their hands on it first for testing. Check it out.

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Gotta get my hands on that!&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Coaching Swimming is a Hell of a Drug

2012-02-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

Rick James should have tried a conference meet

I was thinking about saving this post for a few weeks from now. I didn't want it to seem boastful or arrogant. That's not my point. My point is: championship season is upon us, and for coaches that means that we are about to get our fix. Inside the coaching community, we often joke about how little we get paid, the weird hours, and the weekends sacrificed. So why would anyone go into (or stay) in this profession? Because coaching swimming is a hell of a drug.

To explain, I'm going to go back to my own swimming days. By the time you're in college, there's a good chance that your swimming has fallen into a rhythm. You train all year just to go to one, or maybe two or three meets if you're really lucky, and swim a lifetime best. It feels great to swim faster than you ever have before. All that work and it finally paid off. But I can honestly say it doesn't nearly compare to coaching.

When you're a coach, you get that same hit of dopamine from a swimmer achieving their goal. Only its bigger. In my case, I am lucky enough to coach ten swimmers. Many coaches train more. If your swimmers are tearing it up, that could mean you're getting a hit after hit of that sweet, sweet feeling .

I've talked with other coaches about this, trying to figure out what makes the feeling so much better as a coach than as a swimmer. The volume is certainly a factor, but there's more to it than that. I'm sure that some would argue that the person getting the best experience is the swimmer, but I say they're wrong.

If you're a coach you know what I'm talking about. The swimmer takes flight in the race and becomes someone you've never seen before. They are a faster and stronger version of themselves. When they touch the wall, their head whips around to the scoreboard. Then comes that big grin and pure, childlike joy. When you're a coach, you know that you helped someone do that. You have less control over the outcome than the swimmer, and strangely that makes it better. At least, in my opinion it does.

So I guess that's why this time of year feels like being a little kid waiting for Christmas. You know something good is coming, but the waiting feels like an eternity. You can't wait to rip off that wrapping. I'm just one week away from our women's championship and two from the men's. It's pretty hard to think about anything else: coaching swimming is a hell of a drug.

Goodbye, Swim School!!!

2012-02-03T09:11:00.000-08:00

Sisters racing each other on the last day

It was the end of an era Wednesday night in our household. 18 months after starting my daughters have "graduated" from their swim school. According to the "criteria" they have met the basics for starting swim team; they have a basic grasp of all strokes, they can do a reasonable flip turn and dive off the block. While certainly not ready to be recruited by Bob Bowman for NBAC they have come a long way from paddling around with noodles and I'm really proud.

They're ready for a break. They're always cold. Competition pools are not exactly conducive to little kids with BMI's of 1% and Missouri winters are usually not helpful (although this one so far has been mild.) I told them when they do swim team this summer they'll be warmer. That was met with great positivity. I think they'll really like the competition. I see them "eyeing" the other swimmers they're sharing lanes with. I know they're thinking, "25y freestyle, meet you on the blocks, homegirl." They're ready to race.

Most of the kids in swim school don't go onto swim team, I wonder why. There's no recruiting during lessons. The coaches never talk to us parents sitting in the stands for lessons before they start their practices. Come over, introduce yourself. Shmooze. We talk about growing the sport, here's a grassroots opportunity. We're a captive audience. Come say, "hi," tell us about the swim club and encourage our kids to try out. If the dance teacher hadn't encouraged me to try out for the disco dancing contest when I was 8 I never would have won and received the top prize, a life-size standing cardboard cut out of Barry Manilow. Who knows where I'd be today without that opportunity?

I have very fond memories of the pool I learned to swim in. In fact, when I went back to Chicago this summer I took the girls there. It looked very similar to the way it was in the 70's. I wondered if they were still playing "Rumours" over the loudspeakers. Anyone remember Marathon Bars? ("they last a long, long, long time....") I used to get one from the snack bar every day. I got a little emotional. Even though I never became a competitive swimmer I did teach swimming when I was a teenager and, of course, I love the sport. I told the girls they'll always remember their "first pool."

So on their last night of lessons we took pictures and then went out for ice cream. I'm sure they'll be many more pools in their future and I hope they find great joy in the water for the rest of their lives. Isn't that what every good swim parent wants for their kids?...... Just love it.

Is John Leonard Flipping All of Us Off?

2012-02-01T11:26:00.000-08:00

Seriously?

Five minutes ago my phone rang. A reader that wishes to remain anonymous directed me to the ASCA homepage (www.swimmingcoach.org). What I found seemed like a practical joke. Posted on 2/1/2012 was a "Workout Wednesday" from Bryan Woodward, the (former) head coach of the Gator Swim Club who was arrested more than three weeks ago in a sting operation against child predators.

So it begs the question, is John Leonard just giving us all the finger? After all, this is the same guy who has proudly displayed Paul Bergen and Mitch Ivey in a photo album on the same site. He seems to celebrate defiantly the coaching careers of men who have come into disrepute as of late. I don't know why Leonard continues to keep those coaches in the album. If I had to guess, it would be because he doesn't believe the charges that have been leveled against them. He probably believes he has enough gray area to celebrate Bergen and Ivey. I certainly don't.

In Woodward's case, Leonard either has to be totally ignorant of what has happened with Woodward, or totally defiant. I'm not sure which is worse. Woodward's arrest was well publicized, and if the leader of the biggest swim coaches organization in the country didn't know about it, that is a serious problem. If he knew and decided to go ahead with it anyway, that's a bigger problem.

In order for swimming to get better, we need a massive change in our culture surrounding abuse. That's extremely hard when the power players, John Leonard as exhibit A, don't seem to understand or even recognize the problem. Leonard had no problem getting on his high horse to save us all from "the suits". He had no problem railing on FINA for not involving "coaches" (him or his friends) vote in FINA. But when it came to children being abused by their coaches, Leonard has been totally silent. What kind of leadership is that? Worse yet, Leonard seems to act with impunity from USA Swimming, who despite whatever they say, have a mutually lucrative partnership surrounding coach certification with ASCA that they aren't willing to put before this issue.

As if the workout wasn't offensive enough, it's accompanied by a photo of children with American flags that indicates to me this was some sort of 9/11 tribute (9x1100 is the set). I'm sure that in some way Leonard believes that putting kids through what is an absolutely terrible swim practice is a fitting tribute to all those affected by the worst day in recent American history. Could he be more out of touch?

TEETH!!!

2012-01-31T13:17:00.000-08:00

Admit it. After Chris's post yesterday, your thoughts on the state of Chinese swimming at least briefly turned to one of these two movies.

So, uh... yesterday Chris posted his concerns about Chinese swimmers setting themselves up to soon overtake the American men for world dominance and I was expecting it to launch a firestorm of comments about doping and population base and development systems and structures and maybe even a little Craig Lord bashing and all those other good juicy things that swim nerds can't shut up about that make swim blogs so awesome...

you know-- the whole reason we love the internet: Anonymous arguing where everyone can pretend they are experts and throw insane comments out there with no fear of retaliation other than trolls out-smart-assing them, which is really more fun than it is painful. Blog commenting can be a sport all on it's own, ya know?

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised then, that instead it turned into a discussion about dental hygiene. Really? Jason Lezak couldn't find a company to sponsor him after the greatest relay performance in the history of mankind and you are all worried about an up-and-coming Chinese kid's dental plan only living up to British standards?

because dental hygiene is not necessarily a precursor to grooviness

I am almost surprised I didn't see some right-wing bloggers show up and use our comments section to declare that picture of Sun Yang as proof of the failures of the Chinese socialist system. (Not that I have dental coverage in our wonderful capitalist system or anything...)

Plus, guys... the teeth add a certain something to his intimidation factor. I can't wait for this guy's athlete bio on NBC this summer. I am hoping he tries to bite Matt Lauer.

Thank you internet friends for hijacking the usual swim discussion and launching it into an orbit of absurdity. This is why I will always keep coming back to you.

.

The Musings of a Paranoid Team USA Fan

2012-01-30T10:50:00.000-08:00

Is it only a matter of time before this is the world's best swimmer?

Each year, for the last four years, I've reached a point in the competitive swim calendar where I start a full scale panic about Team USA and their future. The rest of the world starts to hold their earlier trials meets, drop pretty fast times, rocket to the top of world rankings, and I predict the end of Team USA. Each year I've pretty much been wrong. That won't stop me from doing it again.

This year we're off to our earliest ever start. It's only January, and no significant trials competitions have yet been held. That's what makes it scarier than last year. Over the weekend a small group of Chinese swimmers blew the hinges off in an Australian meet.

The intrepid Craig Lord has a report on the meet, although I'll sum it up in a much more digestible form. Sun Yang (you're supposed to remember his name now since he broke the world record in the 1500) went 3:42 400 free. Behind him an 18 year old named Li Yunqi (3:45.49) and a 16 year old named Hao Yun (3:45.69).

How fast is that? The fastest American of any age last year was Peter Vanderkaay, barely ahead of the two teenagers with a 3:44.83. The fastest American 18 year olds were both 3:51.

Let that simmer for a moment- there is now an event where the Chinese men (!!!) have not only arguably the best swimmer, but also way better youngsters than the US. I guess that's why the panic feels more real this year than ever. Amazingly, Craig refused to speculate about whether the Chinese swimmers were part of an evil, systematic doping program. Cue the troll posting under the name "Predicta57" on TSC:

"East Germany X 10"

"Compare the last lap of his [Sun Yang's] mile to the last lap of Phelps and Lochte’s 200 free….. Or even Nathan Adrian’s second lap of his 100 free relay split.

Step back…… Use logic……. Not emotion."

Only problem: most of these Chinese stars are training out of the shadows of their countries' repressive media in Australia. In my opinion, the US has been able to retain swimming dominance by having a large, relatively wealthy populace and good infrastructure. Sure, our actual development of talent is rather inefficient when compared to many European countries, but it hasn't mattered very much given our huge population advantage. China has a population advantage but relatively weak infrastructure and talent development, plus the spectre of drug cheating in its past. They've found a way to use another countries' (mainly Australia) fare more efficient system with their huge talent base.

They're only getting started, which is why the rational part of my brain concludes that team USA, with its large roster of surefire stars, will retain its place of swimming dominance in London. Still, there is increasing evidence that the gap on the men's side between the post-Hansen, Peirsol, Phelps, Lochte generation and their worldwide peers. Rio 2016 may be the dawn of a very different swimming age.

The Blueseventy Nero XII- Can I Be Bought?

2012-01-26T11:59:00.000-08:00

I'll admit the timing of this post is highly suspect. In my last blog, I basically went off half-cocked about the new FS3 system and the havoc it may wreak on this coming championship season. You may not believe me about the sequence of events that followed. Later that day, I got a letter, dated January 12th. It was from blueseventy, offering me an advance trial of their new racing suit, the Nero XII. They offered to send me one, and although they didn't say it, I'm sure they hoped I would write about it in my blog. That's my first disclosure.

My second disclosure is that I am predisposed to like a blueseventy product. I loved the Nero racing suit (yes, the full body, now banned one) from 2008-2009. I was given one during my time at floswimming and I still wear it. I loved it for a lot of reasons- it was significantly faster than the LZR bodysuit and a lot easier to lay your hands on than a Jaked or Arena.

With that out of the way, let me cut to the chase: this suit kicks ass. With men's suits now reduced to textile jammers, there is a lot less room for variation from suit to suit. The two most important factors to me in a jammer these days are fit and compression. The Nero XII excels in both.

The first thing I noticed after putting the Nero XII on was how comfortable it felt. This is a family blog, I know, but just how good the fit was needs to be discussed. Every jammer I have ever swum in gave me the feeling that my crotch was being bisected. This suit doesn't feel that way, and made me question why jammers haven't always taken this into consideration.

Another aspect of jammer construction that has annoyed me in the past has been how tight they are around your knee. As a breaststroker, I felt like my range of motion was sometimes limited by the jammer grabbing at the back of my knee. The Nero XII was snug but didn't feel like it was inhibiting me at all. Again, I wondered why this wasn't always a consideration.

In terms of compression, I didn't measure my thighs before and after or anything but I definitely felt "compressed". Actually, the suit made me a little-self conscious because despite being comfortable to put on and not feeling too tight, wherever the suit ended I had considerable "muffin-topping".

I put the suit on as well as a dome cap and some racing goggles and set about warming up and doing some sprints. I train myself and don't have anyone to time me- but I was pleased with my results judging roughly from a digital pace clock.

Blueseventy didn't pay me anything to write this- just gave me a free suit. I'm going to race test the suit on one of my swimmers this weekend, so check the comment section for an update later!

LEGS!!

2012-01-20T09:28:00.000-08:00

This morning we only did about 1600 yards at practice... but that doesn't mean it was easy. I am one of those coaches who believes that mornings are for getting specific and doing the things that are hard to organize when the whole team is in the pool. We do a lot of speedplay, parachutes, cords and other things that can become chaotic when we are sharing the pool with the whole club. Mornings are valuable, and they are not just to cram in more yardage.

Another belief I hold dear, is that easy kick sets are a waste of time. Kick sets need to have a focus. Which of the great coaches was it who said this gem?: "everything we do in the morning is BS except for the kick." HAHA.

What I am presenting here is nothing new. This first one is actually as old school as it gets, and a lot of people probably think it is ridiculous, but I think that kicking with shoes has great value. I think it forces swimmers to kick big, and engage the larger muscles of the hip and leg with their kick. I love when I can actually see a swimmer's technique improve after they take the shoes off. A proper up-kick can change a lot about a person's freestyle. Kick is not just from the knee down. Kick should lead the stroke.

When my swimmers don't bring a pair of shoes that they are willing to ruin, they get to wear an old pair of my size 14's. It gets pretty comical. Especially when the kids bring high-tops.

The next one is what we call a no-touch. It is a pretty simple concept. We aren't allowed to push off of the wall. Swimmers have to practice building speed from nothing with their dolphin kicks. We do a lot of 25's incorporating these and what I have found is that it helps me to determine who is ready to stay underwater out of the walls longer than others. Some swimmers can keep accelerating while others can get going but their speed stalls. If I can consider their dolphin kick a weapon, then I can start allowing a swimmer to stay under longer as a race strategy. We also do these with zoomers often and we always focus on a clean breakout with a smooth transition from streamline to swim that loses no speed.

I have been know to time turns and starts and to experiment with finding the right number of dolphin kicks for each swimmer. I have a had a few athletes who trained to come up at 15 meters, and others who I have told to do no fly kicks at all... just get up and swim. Of course, it is a skill that can be improved.

About once a week we will just hold on to the wall and kick for 15 minutes, alternating 40 seconds hard with 20 seconds easy. The kids kind of like it because it is so interactive. Even though it is difficult, it is a great chance to joke around with them and play drill sergeant for a while. Swimmers are not allowed to hold on to the gutter, even on the easy parts. The video below is of a wall-kick sprint. We will do 25's or 50 where we hold the wall and kick as hard as possible for 15-30 seconds, and then tuck hard for a flip and a race intensity underwater/breakout. On some we come up and kick the rest of the way, while on some we come up swimming. We will start them holding the wall on back or on belly, (yes, they do a back-flip and push off on their belly) and we focus on accelerating as far as they can without losing speed while still underwater. They are to time their breakout to come while they are still moving fast. We don't want to practice staying under past the point where our swim will start slower, but we do want to practice extending that underwater speed further down the pool by becoming stronger kickers..

If you aren't already incorporating these into your workouts, give it some consideration the next time you start cooking up a kick set. In my opinion, it is hard to make a normal kickboard set that works appropriate fitness levels for a large group all at once, and they can get kind of boring too, especially for the kids who aren't good kickers in the first place. These are a chance to throw in something that can be fun, improve general athleticism, and work on specific skills that will help swimmers become better racers.

SUITS!

2012-01-17T13:06:00.000-08:00

Those were the days!

The title of this post pretty much sums it up. With the decision to allow Speedo's FS3 "System" in NCAA competition this coming year, college swimming is right back in the same situation a majority of us were complaining about in 2009. So, like many coaches, I'm left scratching my head. How did we not see this coming? Why didn't we learn our lesson? And why do so few people seem to care this time around?

First of all, I will say that many saw this coming. When the swimming establishment rose up in 2009 to banish the new generation of bodysuits from the sport, it was a polarizing issue for swimming. On the one side, you had swimming "purists". These were the people who had the most power in the system before the dramatic change in the competitive landscape that year. They naturally wanted to remain in a position where they were the most powerful coaches/swimmers/journalists/swimsuit company/"coaches organization" leader in swimming. They fought tooth and nail to roll suit technology back, and they were successful. There was something decidedly unfair about it. The best analog I ever heard, from someone working at a non-Speedo suit company, was that it was as if you were playing chess against somebody, only after they started losing they decided that pawns could move like queens and that queens were useless. All sorts of reasons were trumped up for casting out the "suits": they cost too much, they are unfair, they are ruining the history of our sport. None of them were true and all are being ignored now.

Another group (that I consider myself a part of) saw something far more exciting. New people were winning, coaches were innovating under the new rules and thriving. The sport was ripe for change, interest was high, and meets were more exciting because the suits mitigated the effect of tired swimmers racing. There was also far more variability where there had been almost none. I swam in college from 2003-2006 and saw nary a non-speedo racing suit at the end of the year. In 2009, I saw blueseventy, rocket science, arena, jaked, all at smaller level US competitions.

In any case, we all know what happened. We went "back" to a suit rule that never existed, arbitrarily cutting women's suits off at the knees and men's from hips to knees. For a while, pretty much every manufacturer had the exact same suit. It took Speedo more than a year to recover from being completely outflanked by their smaller competiton, but in 2011 (alongside some crazy marketing), they released a suit that has reignited my worst fears on this particular issue. All of a sudden, their suit is the "must have" for the coming championship season. Supply issues will no doubt abound, and Speedo is already charging far more for the "system" than a good old poly body suit cost back in the day.

College coaches tried to avert this very situation back in 2009. In the spring of 2009, we (members of the College Swim Coaches Association of America) moved to recommend that the NCAA formally change it's rules to prevent new suits from coming onto the market mid season and be allowed in NCAA competition. This did not happen. There was still some hope and precedent- in 2008 LZRs had not been allowed at the NCAA Championships. However, there was no such ruling this time around.

I'm complaining as one of the "haves". It is likely that my team will have far fewer issues than many outfitting their squads for the end of the year. Do we really feel we're in a better place with this issue than in 2009? I don't think so, but so far the outcry has been muted.

Chatting with Gary Kempf

2012-01-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

On-deck conversations with other swim coaches are one of the best parts of the whole coaching gig. I feel blessed to get to talk shop with some great people on the weekends, and the world of swimming is small enough that it seems like no matter what part of the country a coach is from it turns out that you know some of the same people. I especially love chatting with old school coaches. They often have a kind of insight that could only come from seeing the way we do things now in contrast to where we came from. Often they know personally the people who helped us to innovate and move the sport ever forward and remember the thought processes behind some of the major decisions that have shaped competitive swimming into what it is today.

Last week, while Coach Keyser had the Asbury team training at our pool, I had the pleasure of getting to know his "assistant coaches" Gary and Dorothy Kempf. Gary was the Head Coach at the University of Kansas for over 20 years, and Dorothy is a great coach in her own right. As a matter of fact, Gary says "she is one of the best sprint coaches in the country" and she won't let him touch her sprinters. Haha. They are both just wonderful people and I loved getting to see them work with the Asbury kids.

I got to show Gary an interview I did with Tammy Thomas, one of his former swimmers who was an American Record holder, and he said it made his day. We also talked a little about some of the Alaskans he recruited to swim at KU. One of them I knew pretty well. They called him Robo-Todd and he used to beat the heck out of me when he was 16 and I was 10 playing water polo at swim practice. Anyway, Gary was generous enough to let me turn on my camera so I could share some some of the poolside chatter with all of you Swim-Briefers. Enjoy.

A Different Take on Christmas Training-- Asbury University

2012-01-06T11:37:00.000-08:00

I got an email from a guy recently who was college roommates with one of my former swimmers. He was asking for pool space for when his team comes to town in January. Sure! I am happy to accommodate, but why in the heck are you bringing your team to Joplin, Missouri? Shouldn't you be on a beach somewhere?

So I have to ask all you swim-briefers out there: where did your college team go for Christmas training? Drury is in Hawaii right now. I know some teams head to Florida, Bermuda, Brazil... When you are training that hard, you deserve to spend some time at the beach between workouts, right?

Seems legit... but this coach had other things in mind. No surfing and sunbathing on this trip. They had more important things to do.

Alex Keyser is the Head Coach for the Men's and Women's swimming programs at Asbury University, twenty minutes southwest of Lexington, in Wilmore, Kentucky. They are an NAIA program with almost forty athletes on the team. They pursue excellence between semesters in a unique way in and out of the pool, and Joplin fit into their plan. I will let him tell you a little about that in the video. Get ready to be inspired:

How awesome is that?! Yet more evidence that swimmers can be some of the awesomest people on the planet. Go Asbury Eagles! Way to set an example!

The video below is of a drive before and after the Joplin tornado. You can see that a few weeks had gone by since the storm because in the "after" portion of the video the streets are clear of debris and the light and power poles are up and functioning again, but it gives you an idea of how extensive the damage was. Several businesses and homes have been rebuilt, but driving through town even now is eery, especially when you remember how it all looked before. You can surely tell from Alex's interview that there is still a lot of work to be done out here, but the spirit of community in Joplin is stronger than ever before.

.

The Value of Anonymous

2012-01-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

The serious, social issues strain of the Swim Brief took a nice holiday break. Now, with 2012 upon us and me holed in a hotel room during a Florida cold front, we are back. Today I want to discuss something that was going on in the background of my ongoing discussions with USA Swimming Executive Director Chuck Wielgus. As I posted my series of blogs, Chuck requested that I disable anonymous commenting for the blogs. I refused. Here's why:

It occurred to me that we have never really adequately explained a commenting policy for this site. It's primarily because we don't have one. Over the time this blog has existed, I can't recall deleting a single comment, even though I admit I wanted to sometimes. And I won't commit myself or the other bloggers here to not deleting comments. In fact, we probably should delete more, or respond to more so that people dropping by to read the site don't interpret any endorsement by us of all the comments that appear here.

That said, I think that anonymous voices have a lot to offer you, even when they say something that makes you very upset. As an employee of Georgia Tech, I am subject to semi-anonymous review by all the athletes on our team. I say "semi" because I know each comment comes from one of forty eight athletes, just not which one. For the most part, the evaluation is fairly straightforward. But every year, somebody takes their opportunity to vent.

Last year, I got a full five paragraphs from one person on how unfit I was to coach swimming. I have to admit, reading it the first time made me upset. I thought a lot of it was petty, and untrue, or distorted. But as I reflected on it, I realized that I definitely have something to learn from that comment and others like it. There was a huge gap between what I perceived that I was doing and what one person thought I was doing. These things happen, but you can always improve.

In much the same way, the anonymous comments on this and other websites are opportunities for evaluation. While there may be some misinformation out there, and people can be unfair, I consider it valuable to understand what somebody would say about me behind my back. It doesn't mean that I have to have a dramatic reaction or base my life around it, its just information. If you refuse to look at the anonymous information because some of it is bad then you miss out on the parts that are good.

I still think it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

The 2011 Chesapeake Pro-Am

2012-01-03T06:35:00.000-08:00

I love the Chesapeake Elite Pro-Am. If you are a coach and you are looking for a great meet for a December shave, I can definitely tell you it is worth the trip to Oklahoma City. My swimmers always come back with great stories to tell and it is one of those rare sporting events where club kids get to mingle a little bit with some of the world's best swimmers.

I wrote up a post before the trip this year and for some reason never did post it, (I am retro-posting it here) but in it I list a few of the awesome things I have seen at the meet in the past. This year I can add to that list-- I got to see Anthony Ervin's comeback first hand. Hells yeah... but honestly, that was just one of many highlights. Pick through the results and you will see.

I talked with the meet director, Paul Thompson, about the blog and he gave me permission to post some content. He runs an excellent meet and has for a long time. This was the 20th anniversary of the Pro-Am and it just keeps getting better. I was pretty busy with the 13 athletes I had in the meet, (one picked up his first ever Junior National cut to win the B final in the 200 breast- yay!) and I didn't want to bother the pro's between their races, but I did get a few good conversations recorded that I hope all y'all swim-briefers will enjoy.

Krista Kesberz is one of the coaches for the Chesapeake Swim Club. She swam in the meet as well, but she also was in charge of taking care of all of the Pro's. It took her a while to agree to go on camera, but I finally got her. Incidentally we discovered that in the Garrett McCaffrey/Darren Grose Floswimming recap in the retro-post I mentioned above, she was actually holding the camera and remembered my swimmers getting in the way. Haha.

Gardner Howland is the Head Coach of the Kansas City Blazers:

Kelly Kremer is the Head Coach at the University of Minnesota:

Max McKnight is the Head Official in Charge of Discipline:

Oh yeah... I also recorded a couple of races as well. Enjoy!.. and sorry it took me so long to do this write-up:

I just have to say 'thank you' to everyone involved with putting on the Pro-Am. You are doing great things for the sport of swimming and I wish you twenty more years of success. We will be back next year in force.

100 Minutes With Chuck Part 4: The Future

2011-12-22T07:01:00.001-08:00

This is the last blog in a four part series after a meeting last week with Chuck Wielgus. I had thought we would have the meeting, Chuck and Susan would have time to respond, and things might continue slowly from there. I was mistaken.

Since Saturday, Chuck and I have exchanged over ten emails. Susan and I have communicated over text. Both of them thanked me for the meeting over those respective mediums. I mailed my thank you the old fashioned way to Colorado Springs.

I could paraphrase all of our discussions or just post the messages wholesale, but I won't, at least for now. Chuck and I are still at odds over many issues, including the role anonymous voices should play in this dialogue as well as the consequences for his actions.

To his credit, Chuck has started to show far more humility in our conversations than I ever saw when I was just an another member. Progress in this direction will help him heal the wounds in USA Swimming, but only if the entire membership feels it.

Also to his credit, Chuck has continued to pursue conversation despite the fact that I have not diverted from my two central statements- that what he did was wrong and that he should step down as a result. He has instead tried to give me more information, even extending an invite to Colorado Springs to meet the entire staff and attend a board meeting.

I have to admit to a few personal reservations. The longer this discussion goes the higher the stakes are for both of us. What if, after seeing the inner workings of USAS, I still believe in their failings just as much as I do now? On an even more personal note, I am growing uncomfortable for getting so much attention for writing. I guess I always hoped that if I was flying out to Colorado Springs it would be as a coach. That is the goal I chose. The fight to change USA Swimming for the betterment of all involved chose me.

Last Saturday Chuck mentioned how no one can predict the future. He challenged me to tell him where this was all headed, or what the problem that would blindside them next would be. I wasn't prepared at the time but I am now.

For one, I think non-sexual abuse is common in swimming but has had little attention paid, for many of the same reasons that sex abuse went undetected. USA Swimming has no idea how many of its athletes are abused. Although that number is impossible to find out, that shouldn't stop us from trying. The fact that little attention has been paid is continuing evidence of a disconnect between Colorado Springs and ground level problems. Every year as a college coach I am subject to anonymous reviews by every athlete on my team. What would we find out if every USAS coach had to do the same?

Susan Woessner has been given an enormous responsibility. Because we are still underestimating the problem by so much, she is one person doing the job of many. Athlete protection is adding an employee. A step in the right direction, but not far enough.

In 5-10 years, I think we will be regretting how slowly we moved once we knew there was a problem, and how we continued to underestimate the problem. That is, unless we make dramatic , somewhat painful change. I'm not so naive to think that pouring more resources into athlete protection comes from an endless pot of money. But is it worth it? Absolutely. I plan on using whatever influence I've gained to make us a little less resentful.

100 Minutes with Chuck Part 3: Why?

2011-12-20T12:15:00.000-08:00

I want to make something very clear from the beginning of this post. I am about to give my best attempt at explaining why not just Chuck but our board of directors and others failed to do the right thing. I think it's an important endeavor to understand, but not excuse why bad things happen. I'll repeat it simply for emphasis: I want to explain but not excuse.

In my last post I discussed my own motivations. One of the things I left out is that I feel a lot of compassion for my abuser. I don't know, but I have a strong feeling that he feels the same hurt that I did. It is likely that he is still living with it while I have been able to (mostly) move on. The sad truth of abuse is that many abusers were abused themselves. They are deeply hurt individuals that need help.

But what about everybody else? The people who turn a blind eye, or don't say anything, or only go as far as their lawyer tells them they need go? Why do they do it? I believe there are a variety of explanations for this behavior.

Allow me to get briefly sidetracked with an anecdote. My mother in law grew up in Baltimore during the 1960s and 70s. She remembers quite well being allowed to play and run around the city on her own. It wasn't abnormal behavior. People, in general, just weren't that worried about what would happen to children let run free in a big city. A few decades later, with violent crime actually much less frequent in a major city like Baltimore, people are much more hesitant to let their children run free. Why? Because they are much more aware of the potential danger, even though it is less. This is a paradox that is facing the swimming community today: I think that if many parents knew how likely it was that their coach was abusing children, they would likely stay. At the same time, having that knowledge is probably one of the best deterrents there is.

There is a generational gap in understanding just how big of a problem this is. When I say "generational gap", I am not suggesting that all people older than a certain date do not understand and all younger people do. I am saying that the younger you are, the more likely you understand. Joe Paterno, for instance, came from a generation that generally did not talk about sexual abuse. His experience can explain why Paterno did not do the right thing. Joe Paterno's age and culture help to explain why he did the things he did, but they don't excuse it.

Walking away from my meeting with Chuck, I realized that this generational gap is more than just this issue. There is a generation that is entrenched with power in swimming as a sport right now. Take a look, for instance, at the coaching staff for World Championships last summer, with approximate ages:

Eddie Reese (70), Frank Busch (60), Gregg Troy (60), Bob Bowman (48), Jon Urbanchek (70?), Teri McKeever (50), Jack Bauerle (56?)

The USA Swimming Board of Directors is lead by President Bruce Stratton (app. 62). A quick scan of the rest of the board finds few, if any, young people (and I'm defining young as less than 45 years old) where they aren't required, i.e athlete reps.

It would be very "young turk" of me to just dismiss the accomplishments of all these people off hand. They are there because they have done good things in swimming. Chuck was extremely proud and eager to talk to me in our meeting about all of his other accomplishments as Executive Director. I have to confess that was I was 13 years old when he took the position I have very little idea what it was like before he got there. It is obvious that there are people who have been around and feel positive about his leadership.

The makeup of USA Swimming, both it's volunteer board, it's paid employees, and the most powerful coaches with the most influence, are overwhelmingly stacked with people who likely empathize with Chuck for being caught off guard in 2008. They were likely caught off guard as well. Unless USA Swimming leadership makes an effort to empower their young critics they will continue to lead from behind on this issue. Meanwhile, that younger generation looks on, disgusted, incredulous that their leadership could be caught off guard by something they think is so obvious. Even more enraging for that younger, disempowered generation is the lack of accountability. They see the people in power make mistakes but they see no consequences.

In between, there is room for reconciliation. But it has to start at the top, with the people in power. Those on the bottom have already made plenty of concessions- they had no choice.

100 Minutes with Chuck Part 2: My Bias

2011-12-19T09:10:00.000-08:00

The following is the second part in a series of blogs about my meeting on Saturday, December 17th with USA Swimming Executive Director Chuck Wielgus. Click here for part 1.

I spent nearly all of Saturday processing. I was lucky that Kate was with me. Not only did she ask all the questions I would have kicked myself for not asking afterwards, but she was somebody else I could talk to about what had happened. She also probed me to think more about my own motivations than I had before. That afternoon I told her a secret.

It's not a secret to many of my teammates or my parents, but it is to this audience just as it was to Kate. In my life, I have been abused by my coach. Not sexually, not to the horrifying, debilitating degree that many swimmers have. But I know I was abused. When I told someone who had the power to stop it, to take a stand for me, that person chose to protect my abuser, even suggested that I deserved it. That was the experience that kept me up at night before the meeting.

I'm going to go into more detail only because I believe that it might help someone else. The abuse carried over several years. The coach knew my insecurities and attacked them precisely. The primary, but not the only, target was my weight. It was something that I'd never felt particularly self-conscious about. The more he targeted me, the worse I felt, and the more I comforted myself with food. Emboldened, one of my teammates joined in the "fun". Rather than protect me from that teammate, my coach actually forced me to swim with him every day. When I protested, he told me he was having me swim with that particular teammate so that he wouldn't pick on anyone else.

I remember the anger, sadness and frustration. I remember feeling totally powerless to do anything about it. I had to medicate myself to sleep, otherwise I would lay in my bed restless with anger. I was angry at my coach but also angry at myself for not confronting him. I thought about quitting but I was too stubborn to do it. I loved swimming and I wasn't going to let a coach ruin it for me.

After two years and with the help of family, friends and mental health professionals, I got momentum in the right direction. I lost some weight and felt better about myself. My coach's taunts turned to back slaps. Everything was fine on a superficial level, but I hadn't forgotten what it was like before. At one practice, I saw my coach go after some of my teammates. My anger was back again. I wanted to protect them, I didn't want them to be a victim like me. I wrote an e-mail I came to regret. In it I told my teammates the truth: that coach was abusive and that they didn't need to take it. They could hold their heads high.

I should have known that the e-mail would propel me into a confrontation I had long avoided. One of my teammates forwarded the e-mail to my coach. The next day I found myself in his superiors office. The two of them confronted me. Did I know how serious my allegation was? I did. They threatened to remove me from the team if I didn't recant. I stood my ground. I detailed everything as calmly as I could to my coach and his superior. When I was done, his superior asked me "But wouldn't you admit that losing some weight helped you swim faster?".

My cat out of the bag, reactions from my teammates were mixed. Some of them felt like I was putting them in the way of a fight that was just between me and my coach. Still others came to me and told me stories far more chilling than mine. They had been abused too. I felt like I hadn't done enough. so I climbed one rung higher in administration and told my story again. At this level, I at least wasn't told I deserved it, but the inaction was the same.

I didn't have peace for a long time after that again. I struggled with the same cycle of anger and frustration. I was incredibly lucky that in the next year I would meet my wife, somebody who has lifted me up in too many ways to count. After two years still feeling angry, I read in a book about the power of forgiveness. I wrote my coach to tell him that even though he had never apologized to me, I forgave him. I apologized for my own anger and immaturity in dealing with the situation.

Kate believes (as do I, to a certain extent) that our meeting would have gone differently had I been up front with Chuck and Susan about this event in my past. I have no idea whether either of them were ever abused by a coach- they may very well have been. I recognize that every individual handles it differently. I also recognize that some people will read this blog and scoff at it. They will call it a sob story and think I am playing a victim. There will be those who, like that superior, think I deserved it. I am at peace with that fact although I admit it did give me trepidation before writing this.

So I have to admit, when I see the Chuck respond to Katie Kelly's e-mail with "No formal complaint is being filed, so there is no formal action for us to take" I go back. When I see Deena Deardurff Schmidt hold a press conference and, when asked about it, Chuck says "Well...I wish she would file a complaint", I go back. I go back to that room where I sat with my abuser and someone who could do something about it but chose not to.

It's easy to give in to anger, but I've learned over the years it doesn't help. I'm incredibly lucky that I had so many people to help me do better than be angry. The best I can come up with at the moment is to continue saying as best I can to Chuck and others a simple truth: what you did was wrong.

In my next blog, I'm going to attempt to explain, but not excuse, why these things happen.

100 Minutes with Chuck: Part 1

2011-12-18T16:37:00.000-08:00

On the Tuesday before my meeting with Chuck Wielgus, I couldn't sleep. Saturday morning brought back a lot of bad memories I would rather not relive. There were four of us in the lounge of the Marriot Marquis: Chuck and I with Susan Woessner and my wife Kate. We spoke for roughly an hour and forty minutes, far longer than I expected. If my thoughts before the meeting were tortured, afterwards I almost had too much to process. My opinions about Chuck's actions and leadership are unchanged. In a series of blogs this week, I hope to explain everything as I saw it.

Chuck told someone later that although he thought the meeting went well, he wished he could've gotten me to crack a smile. While proposing the meeting, Susan had expressed her hope that I would feel differently about Chuck once I met him. Chuck spoke frequently of his children, two teenage girls and two older sons. I had no preconceptions about Chuck personally, but I'm not so naive about the world that I thought only someone monstrous could do what he has done. It's an unfortunate truth that many people who are otherwise considered "good people" can fail to do the right thing. That was part of the comparison I was trying to draw between Chuck and Joe Paterno in a previous blog.

As I mentioned in the comment section of my previous blog, our conversation started long before Saturday. Chuck e-mailed trying to "manage [my] expectations" for what we could discuss. When pressed, Chuck quoted USA Swimming's confidentiality policy. He also made it clear he wanted to say less than it allowed. He also said he wouldn't discuss "personnel", citing "standard business practice". I agreed to respect the confidentiality outlined in the USA Swimming rulebook, and nothing more.

He provided more explanation when we met. He pleaded that, given the ever growing list of lawsuits against USA Swimming and their handling of sexual abuse by coaches, lawyers governed what he could say. Chuck asserted that he wants to engage his critics. He now feels powerless to do so, although he told Kate later that he didn't feel he needed to answer my criticisms anyway.

I decided before the conversation that I wouldn't go in guns blazing. The responses that I got were telling, those given to Kate were far more so. Chuck was not as defensive for Kate's questions. When she asked him whether he was caught off guard by having to deal with the problem of sexual abuse by coaches, he was emphatic that he was. I got the impression that Chuck believes any other person would have done the same: that critics like me are abusing hindsight. Those two responses were part of a theme: Chuck would say something humble and then undermine it. I asked him later whether he thought USA Swimming members had a right to be disappointed in his leadership. He admitted that he felt badly about his performance in the ABC 20/20 interview but followed that up with a defense of why he did not do well. He cited that the 20/20 interview was the only disappointment that the USA Swimming board had in him. (EDIT: Chuck emailed me after reading the blog to inform me that neither he nor the board considered this the only disappointment.

I hope to explain in the following blogs just how complex the problem is we are facing. I left the meeting feeling no different about Chuck's actions. Whether or not he did not fulfill his legal responsibility as our leader will be decided in the courts and not in this blog. USA Swimming members can judge whether Chuck meets their expectations as a leader of our organization. Just as with the law, ignorance is no excuse.

Meeting Internet Friends

2011-12-15T10:15:00.000-08:00

Bjarnason during Tuesday's warmup

One of the pleasures of writing this blog is that I get to talk to people from all across the country and the world about swimming. One of the hazards is that many of my friends are people I have never met "in real life", whatever that means in 2011. Duel in the Pool this weekend is going to feature some crazy fast swimming in an awesome format. It's also a chance to meet a couple characters I've written a lot about, Jon Bjarnason and Pal Joensen.

Pal is here representing Denmark for the first time. You see, the "European All Stars" is really "the best swimmers we could get to agree to fly directly from European Champs over here and not go to a silly meet in Russia with more prize money". Denmark is one of the countries invited. Joensen has thus far represented the Faroe Islands in every international meet he's swum in. However, the Faroe Islands does not have it's own IOC membership, thus Joensen must represent big brother Denmark. This consequence is not without it's past or present politics.

At this meet, however, Joensen represents just one of the swimmers who should be favored against the American opposition in his primary event. I had a chance to watch both of them in workout earlier this week and practice my Faroese. The workout went much better. It's phenomenal to see an athlete who can travel for nearly 24 hours and look sharp in the water the next day.

Jon and I had a long conversation, one which we've been having for some time and that I've hinted at before. I admire the Faroese for the efficiency of their system. Despite all the disadvantages in terms of infrastructure (no 50 m pools, just a handful of pools total in the country), they have an elite international senior swimmer and fast juniors on the way. Meanwhile, they admire the great resources we have at our disposal.

One of the things we discussed was the clustering of athletes under one coach, a practice that has in the past become even more frequent. The most recent and dramatic case was last year's crowding of Trojan Swim Club, with seemingly infinite elite swimmers choosing to train in the same place. The Post Graduate Centers are institutionalized clustering, but the process will continue whether or not USA Swimming promotes it.

Jon and I agree on one central point: no matter how good you are at coaching, the quality of training you are delivering decreases with each successive athlete you are coaching. This is particularly poignant for adult, international caliber athletes. These are athletes that have reached a point where they need extremely specific training to continue to improve and develop. For instance, even though I believe Dave Salo is the best swim coach in the entire world, there are far too many elite swimmers there.

I recognize that I am essentially making a socialist argument in the country of capitalism. This is America after all, if you are the best coach than you should have as many swimmers as will swim for you! There is also some benefit to having other elite athletes to train with. What is the magic number? I don't know, but if I had to guess it would probably be less than ten. Jon has every reason to be overconfident about his own coaching ability, but he had enough humility to admit that it has been a challenge to add just one more international caliber swimmer to his coaching responsibilities earlier this year.

Coffee with Chuck

2011-12-12T11:35:00.001-08:00

Lest I bury the lead of this post, I'll start with this: next weekend I'm meeting with USA Swimming Executive Director Chuck Wielgus. If that sounds unbelievable. Rest assured that I am just as surprised.

Susan Woessner, who reached out to me roughly a month ago, has been the broker for the meeting. I haven't heard anything from Wielgus himself. When she first brought it up, I was incredulous. Did he know that I had written publicly that he should resign? I was told that he did, although I could get no assurances that he had read me making fun of him for not using the internet.

The purpose of the meeting remains somewhat ambiguous. I have been told by Susan that it will be very informal. It will be a chance to start a dialogue. Perhaps I'll start to get answers to the questions I've posed in this blog, or perhaps not. Either of which will be telling.

If you've been following long enough you know that during my briefly realized podcast I tried to get Chuck to talk to me. This was shortly after his 20/20 appearance. I was curtly denied. Now Colorado Springs seems increasingly interested in actively engaging one of it's most vocal critics. To what end? I hope to know more on Saturday.

All are invited to the /r/swimmer party!

2011-12-10T07:38:00.000-08:00

Lately I have become a Redditor. If you don't know what I am talking about, you are missing out. Reddit.com is a news site where anyone can post text, photos or links and they are ranked with up/down votes by readers. Those posts grabbing the highest number land on the front page. One of the best things about it is that the comments, like floswimming back in the day, are a free for all.

I am getting a lot smarter from reading articles about foreign policy and science, and dumber due to Rage Comics and memes, but after a while I realized I had been reading a lot less about swimming so I tried to find out if our sport had a presence there. When I sought out the sub-reddit /r/swimming, I was a little disappointed. There was no funny, and hardly any links to real swimming news and blogs, so I decided to start a new sub-reddit for real swimmers: reddit.com/r/swimmer

This is a meme someone posted: First World Swimmer Problem. Don't worry, you'll understand when you get sucked in to browsing reddit.

Please head there and subscribe. I ain't gonna lie-- I plan to post links to our stuff there just like we do on facebook and twitter, but at reddit, anyone can post anything they think is interesting. The more the merrier. The up and down votes sort it out democratically. It is yet another swim community to check in with every day, but I have to tell you, it could become a really cool thing if we get enough swimmers, coaches and fans on board.

See you there!

Nighttime Snack: Just in Time

2011-12-09T14:25:00.001-08:00

In a post earlier this week, I bemoaned the lack of track blocks at the Winter Nationals recently held at our home pool. So imagine my surprise when I came to practice on Monday and saw this:

It's here! We couldn't have gotten them a few days earlier? But that wasn't the only thing that was dramatically different. Where our west pool once was the floor has been raised and USA Swimming is building an ambitious set of stands that will put fans right on top of the turn end of the pool:

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Heading to the Chesapeake Pro-Am

2011-12-07T12:04:00.001-08:00

Since I am back to club coaching again, I am thrilled to have the chance to go back to Oklahoma City for one of the coolest meets in the midwest. What is not to like about the Chesapeake Elite Meet? They offer prize money with bonuses for setting records; they attract some pretty big name national team swimmers along with great clubs and college teams from around the country; and they offer the tournament style "50 free shoot-out" that has proven to be a lot of fun over the years.

This is the 20th year of the meet, and a meet record swim to win the 50 or the 1650 could bring someone $2400 each! I have been smoking two cartons a day, all week getting ready for that mile and I plan to start swimming some laps sometime soon too. $2400 would buy a lot of smokes. (Yes, I really did just hyper-link to the story recommending cigarettes as a training tool. Deal with it. I ain't deleting that masterpiece.)

In the few times I have been there I saw Dave Denniston swim a 1:54 200 breast, watched Lezak hit 42.22 in the 100 and 19.11 in the 50 unshaved in a brief, watched Amanda Beard almost get worked over in the 200 breast by a local high school kid , Caroline Bruce, who was relatively unknown at the time, and had some of my young swimmers get autographs from some of swimming's super-stars. It is just an all-around fantastic swim meet experience.

One of my friends was lucky enough to land the 8th place spot in the prelims for the shoot-out once. That put him, you guessed it... up against the first place swimmer in round one of the semi's for a one-on-one swim. Who was first seed to complete the match-up? Jason Lezak. My buddy now has a story he can tell for the rest of his life that even non-swimmers will appreciate. How freakin' cool is that?

One of my favorite memories from the meet comes from Swimming World's coverage in 2009. I wasn't actually there that year but several of my swimmers were, which made this video an extra special treat.

Please notice the swimmers in the bleachers. Many of them are from my club. If you are paying attention, you will see our club coach at the time (former swimmer of mine) picking his nose, one of our girls poking her head out and making a face at the camera, and several of our team's swimmers just walking right through the footage and pushing Garrett and Darren out of the way like they own the place. The nerve!

At one point Garrett even says "that's okay... we're just live on the internet" and then later "so, apparently we're getting in everyone's way so we are gonna call it a night." Haha. Some of those kids will be going this year with me. They are a fun group. I will try to keep them from ruining everyone else's good time. Haha.

Are any of you readers out there gonna be at the meet? If so, let me know. So far I have never actually met anyone in person who reads the blog and I am starting to wonder if the comments are actually just really well-programmed robot-generated spam. Plus, my life doesn't have enough awkward experiences... if you spot me on deck, please pretend you are a fan of my work so I can make the most of it.

Just kidding.

Kind of. You would probably end up in a video on the blog. But don't let that scare you off from saying hi.

.

Call and Response: The War of Words Between USAS and "Splash"

2011-12-07T08:29:00.001-08:00

I had a funny "encounter" with USA Swimming President Bruce Stratton while at Nationals. As he was making the rounds on the pool deck, I made eye contact with him while standing alone. He quickly looked away, as if he was on his way to talk to someone behind me. I followed him with my gaze: no one there. He made eye contact with me again and averted his eyes to something past me a second time. He walked across me a second time. Again, no one there. He made eye contact a third time, then stared out at the pool and smiled for a while, before walking away.

Now, I have no idea if Bruce Stratton has any clue who I am. He may very well not, but given what I've written about USA Swimming in this space I think he might. He also might have just been wondering "why is this weird guy staring at me?". When, last week, he wrote an e-mail to all of USA Swimming membership, I considered writing a public response in this blog. After all, Bruce stated in his e-mail that he wanted an "open, constructive" dialogue.

Before I get to anything else, I want to commend one vital part of the e-mail. USA Swimming has delivered on an excellent education course for coaches and officials. Stratton states that a separate education program for swimmers 11 and older and 10 and under will come in the first part of 2012. My expectations are high, given the quality of the educational component that I took part in earlier this fall. This is another positive step that USA Swimming has taken as an organization.

Earlier in the letter, Stratton takes aim at "anonymous e-mails" that "make disparaging claims about good, honest, hard working staff and volunteers" and discourage victims of abuse from coming forward. I can only imagine that Stratton is referring to the e-mails and website www.usswimnscandal.com, aka "Splash of Truth". While there are some legitimate criticisms of this website, Stratton's vague paragraph only creates a straw man.

It is easy for Stratton to dismiss an anonymous website. However, there are people (like myself, Tony Austin and others) that have put their names on direct criticisms of his organization. Why has he chosen not to address those criticisms? The only logical conclusions are that either he does not know they exist, or thinks that they aren't worth addressing. Both conclusions are fairly troubling.

The accusation that the anonymous e-mails and website discourage reporting would have some weight if Stratton were willing to acknowledge the faults within his own organization. I, for one, would appreciate USA Swimming being honest instead of pretending to be perfect. There has to this point been zero acknowledgement of any responsibility by any USA Swimming staff or volunteer in this matter. I believe this lack of accountability, the insistence that we "move forward" as an organization with no change in leadership, feeds the "anonymous" attacks. There is a real frustration that the top leadership doesn't see or understand.

That lack of accountability in leadership does far more harm to victim reporting in my opinion. And until there is substantive, honest leadership, it's going to remain in the way of USA Swimming becoming the organization that it truly wants to be.

Late Night Snack: Swim Brief on NBC (sorta....not really....)

2011-12-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

Makes you tear up a little, no?

So this afternoon while the kids were at school I turned on NBC's coverage of ATT Nationals as I sat and folded an endless barrage of towels (because that's what swim moms do) when....lo-and-behold...who shows up in the background of a Brendan Hansen interview but our very own Mike Gustafson wandering around with nothing but a camera, a USA Swimming All Access Pass and a dream.

Goodbye Nationals!

2011-12-05T08:14:00.001-08:00

Is Brendan Hansen all the way back? Is it fair to have seven out of ten finalists at US Nationals be from another country? Is Ed Moses' promotional rap video the worst or best thing to happen in the history of swimming? I answer these questions and more as I look back at Nationals here in my home pool.

As usual with a National meet, my pre-meet expectations made the actual results fizzle a little. I think Olympic Trials in 2008 spoiled me- it was my first "national" meet and it's really not a fair comparison.

Brendan Hansen had one of the most impressive swims of the weekend in the 200 breast, a swim that I think bodes well for his 100 as well. Although Hansen failed to break 1 min in the 100, his 2:09 in the longer race is evidence that he has quite a bit of fitness at the moment. Actually, it's interesting to see the parallels between him and Ed Moses, who had a far poorer 100 swim, and a decent 200. Both seem to be struggling not with fitness but with translating it to an all out breaststroke sprint. I hope they find the technique in the next six months.

Moses, of course, made much more noise outside of the pool than in it. While the meet was going on, Universal Sports released "Splash on Em". I feel a bit conflicted about the whole thing- on the one hand the whole "look at me, I'm totally not what you would expect for a rapper but I'm making this rap song" thing is kind of played out. On the other hand, swimming desperately needs athletes who have any sense of fun.

There were a couple things that disappointed on the weekend. I found myself defending Georgia Tech even though our coaching staff wasn't responsible for hosting the meet. The first and most glaring was the lack of track blocks at the meet. Given the level of competition, it was unacceptable that they were not at the meet. I know that the GT facility does not own track blocks- it was USA Swimming's responsibility to bring in the attachments. As usual, no explanation was given. Warmup facilities during the competition were also somewhat limited- although this would be a issue at most indoor 50 meter facilities.

There was a fair amount of grousing over the international presence at the meet. As I mentioned in the lede, seven out of ten finalists in the men's 400 free were from outside of the US. This meet was much more like a "US Open" in that foreign competitors were allowed into finals, although could not score. I think that seven foreigners in the 400 free is much more an indictment of our national performance in that event than a problem of foreigners flooding the competition. I say the more elite international competitions we can hold on US soil the better.

In the end, it was both tiring and gratifying. Georgia Tech went from 3 Trials qualifiers to 7, with three swimmers making the cuts exactly. I went shopping in the Lenox Mall with my wife on Sunday and ran into Laure Manadou (and child) shopping for shoes in Bloomingdale's. So yeah, that's Nationals.

My Team Doesn't Take Bathroom Breaks...

2011-12-03T19:35:00.000-08:00

we take smoke breaks.

I am all about reading up on the latest science to help me become a better coach. Of course, there are a lot of off-the-wall coaches out there spouting some really ridiculous stuff, so I don't buy into everything I read on the internets. Have you seen those Boomer Chronicles videos?! Yeah, right! What a bunch of hooey. I only pay attention to articles that use big sciency-sounding words and cite sources and stuff, because that means I can believe every word they are saying. I like to think I am somewhat of an innovator, and that is why I love it when I stumble upon a gem like this one, in a scientific journal, written by someone like me who really thinks outside the box.

Kenneth A. Myers, BSc wrote a really intriguing review of existing research entitled "Cigarette Smoking: An Underused Tool in High-Performance Endurance Training." In it, he explains that several studies have pointed out that smoking has an impact on three factors related to endurance performance: serum hemoglobin, lung volume and weight loss. Essentially, he is saying that smoking gives us all of the benefits of altitude training and more, with results that are much less temporary. He cites several sources showing data supporting these claims, and then says "despite this scientific evidence, the prevalence of smoking in elite athletes is actually many times lower than in the general population. The reasons for this are unclear; however, there has been little to no effort made on the part of national governing bodies to encourage smoking among athletes."

USA Swimming needs to get with the program. USA Cycling is years ahead of us in pursuing a more science based training regimen.

The best part of the article is that the author sees this as a developmental tool in age group athletics. He states that since the benefits of smoking "appear to be dose-dependent and may not develop until many years after initiation of treatment... smoking should be commenced at as young an age as is reasonably possible. Children who have not yet developed a pincer grasp might require modified cigarette holders, safety lighters or both."

Wow. This guy thought of everything. He even says this regarding the laws that prevent anyone under age 18 from buying cigarettes: "countries should strongly consider repealing the existing laws or at least allowing exemptions for people thought to have athletic potential in endurance sports." Where do I apply to get my 10 & unders their smoking permit? Fan-freaking-tastic!

This picture of a young Kate Ziegler proves that her coaches in Florida had identified her talent and had her on the right track before she had even graduated from their lessons program.

I can't wait to fill in my assistant coaches on the new direction our program is going to take. I plan to give every new member a carton of Marlboro's when they sign up. Well, maybe I should start with menthols for the little guys, I guess-- but by the time a child turns eleven years old and can start swimming the 500 and the 200's of the strokes in meets, I hope to have them up to about a pack a day. Really, I should be progressively building the kids so that they smoke two packs at every practice by the time they get to high school, which puts them up to four packs a day when they start doing doubles. Should I contact the PE coach to see if they can light up during their weights classes at school? That could put us up to six packs a day which would be pretty freaking phenomenal. I am pretty sure none of the other teams in the area will be smoking anywhere near that many cigs. I wonder if I can get my swimmers' parents to stand at the end of their lanes with lighters so my swimmers don't have to miss their intervals when they have to mess with lighting up between repeats. Come to think of it, the kids can't really just set a lit cigarette at the end of their lane next to their water bottle. It would get all soggy with the splashes from their flip turns. Do they make waterproof cigarette protectors?

this guy is getting ready to rip that 1500 in half. There is no way he ain't gonna make that trial cut.

This is really exciting to me. I get so sick of all of these so-called "experts" writing their books and selling their DVD's to tell me how to make my swimmers faster. Really? Can you show me one single scientific study that proves that pilates is anything more than a waste of time? Can you prove to me through scientific hypothesis that getting the right balance of carbohydrates, proteins and fats will help my swimmers to recover better? No, you can't... because you were making all that crap up!

I plan to make a real change in the way I coach my swimmers at all levels, and I got the science to back it up. The term "smoker" ain't just reserved for the guys in the outside lanes any more.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/

The FS3 Combo Pack

2011-12-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

It's been a couple of years now since polyurethane was banned from suits and length restrictions freed our calves, forearms and man-boobs from captivity, but I am starting to worry that we might be opening that door again with the new Speedo gear. I fear that this new tech could set off a chain of events that could have us all arguing once again about technology cheapening the sport as we head into the 2012 Olympics.

Some of the biggest arguments against tech suits were:

-They cost too much
-Some swimmers got more advantage than others
-Compression wards off fatigue
-We could no longer compare to historical records

So now with the whole 3 pack and the suit that gives you 11% advantage this way and 16% advantage that way, the cap that fills in the natural line of your neck to reduce drag, and the goggles that make you look like Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD-- do we need to revisit this whole thing again? Methinks those arguments against the tech suits really haven't been solved.

Kabukiman? If you don't know who he is, you need a little TROMA in your life.

After the plastic was banned and suits were supposed to be deemed "permeable," of course Speedo tried to sneak this one by us, which was thankfully recalled-- but with FS3 they aren't even trying to hide that the new tech is as close to the old plastic monsters we banished all to hell as possible.

Seriously... watch the video and tell me that we aren't right back to 2008:

Of course, like every comedian on Earth breathed a sigh of relief when George W was re-elected, a blogger like me should probably just shut up and be glad that we might have this wonderful topic out there to argue about once again.

My guess is that after Phelps retires, we will be back to plastic and full length suits in 2013 and this stuff will be downgraded to a practice suit anyway.

View From the Stands: Swim Fans Rejoice!

2011-11-30T05:20:00.000-08:00

Hip Hip Hooray!

Okay swim fans, is everyone here? There's A LOT going on, good stuff. How 'bout Urban Meyer going to Ohio State? Wait, wrong sport........ sorry.

First up, Speedo is about to unleash it's big secret today, the Speedo Fastskin 3. Guaranteed to make all you swimmers faster than Michael Phelps during the last 50 of a 200 fly. It's FINA-approved so it must "look" normal. I'll never forget everyone sitting around the Today Show in '08 looking like crosses between Aqua Man and extras from some rubber fettish film. I noticed there's not a lot of media yet (as of midnight the night before) but there's this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/swimming/8919972/Speedo-hope-revolutionary-Fastskin3-swim-suit-will-see-records-tumble-at-London-2012-Olympics.html

Secondly, Ryan "Jeah" Lochte has been nominated by Kelli Anderson as Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year. It's a great article. As a swim fan it makes me proud of "our" athletes who work so hard....usually not for the nearly the same fortune, fame and glory as say, an NFL or NBA player who is always on the cover. This is great for the sport. Kelli's article is here:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/magazine/sportsman/11/22/anderson.lochte/

Lastly, 2011 AT&T Winter National Championships begin on Thursday in Atlanta. Our very own Chris Desantis and Michael Gustafson will be there so, if not for any other reason, check it out. They've worked really hard on their mash-up and they've got some some really hot dance moves. The psych sheet can be found here:

http://www.usaswimming.org/_Rainbow/Documents/8c51328f-caef-46ab-bb60-0e4b77e69110/psych%20sheet.pdf

Good stuff! Yippee!!

Contacted by Ben Sheppard (UPDATED)

2011-11-29T10:00:00.001-08:00

Back in September, I wrote a post concerning the an article about Ben Sheppard, an Oakland area swim coach who was accused of sending inappropriate messages to his swimmers. Since then, very little has happened- by all accounts Sheppard lost both of his jobs. One was with the Oakland Community Pools and another with USA Swimming. So, needless to say, I was pretty surprised when he contacted me via facebook.

Ben wrote me to say he wasn't very happy with what I wrote. Although I didn't actually pass judgement on whether the specific allegations against Sheppard were true, I did use pretty strong language afterwards to denounce what I considered was still far too much silence on the issue. I responded to Sheppard's message and what followed was a tense but fairly tame exchange between Sheppard and I. Here was his initial message:

hi chris

I just wanted to reach out to you to let you know that I really did not appreciate your journalism regarding me.
You took the word of a local neighborhood newspaper that had no fact and no proof. It is your freedom, of speech right to say what you wish, but you had and have no idea if its true. And trust me its not.
In any case, I suppose it is your job to report what you read, but you yourself should know not to believe everything your read.

respectfully
Ben

Here is how I replied:

Hey Ben,

Thanks for writing me. I don't consider myself a journalist but that's not an excuse if I've unfairly maligned you.

What happened? I'd be happy to be wrong, believe me

I suppose if I could do it over again I wouldn't have said thank you, but my mother ingrained me to say it almost reflexively (you can see that Sheppard responds in kind below.). As I said in my message, I would be genuinely happy to be wrong, even if I had to point out that I overreacted and contributed to smearing someone with my post. Being wrong would mean that the behavior described in the article (suggestive facebook messages to girls on his team) did not take place. Here is Ben's response:

accusations that werent founded...thats more than Ive been advised to say. trust me it was not you who did the damage. and I DO NOT want you to re approach the topic. but I just thought I would reach out to let you know.

thanks
ben

Sheppard asked me not to revisit the issue, which is what I'm doing in this blog, and you'll see why in a moment. At this point I grew curious- Sheppard seemed to be very interested in changing my mind but not interested in me writing about it. I tried to gently push him to be more specific:

I understand if there are pending legal matters that make you not want to say more. I will follow the story and I'll re approach the topic if new information comes out. I would need to find out that you never sent the messages that are alleged in the article and comment section below to change my mind.

To which Sheppard responded:

You are entitled to your beliefs and there are no pending legal matters

Now I thought, "this is a curious situation". I had read that Sheppard had been fired from USA Swimming. I figured that because of this there must be some sort of pending matter with them. I decided to call Susan Woessner and ask her. She however, declined to comment because she cannot do so on pending child protection matters for the protection and privacy of all involved..(An original version of this post simply stated that Woessner did not comment except to say that Sheppard is not a member. This was incorrect. ). So I sent Sheppard another question:

Then why wouldn't you just say "I never sent those messages that they said I did"? That's a much clearer refutation than the one you gave me. If you did send the messages I can't think of a context in which they are appropriate.

To which he wrote:

I thought I said that I have always said that

If I could respond to this message all over again, I would have. I had no idea that Sheppard had "always said that". I hadn't seen any public comment from him at all, besides this one from the East Bay Express article:

"They aren't true" and "I'm not even sure entirely what your [sic] referring to."

This is still somewhat vague in my opinion. So I asked this question:

but then do you know who sent them?

From there, no response in the last week. My response assumes there were messages, which Sheppard may contest. Although part of me is conflicted about writing this post since he asked me nicely not to, I also don't believe I am bound to keep the conversation secret by Sheppard. The lack of information surrounding this goes back to my original fall post- the secrecy seems to hurt everyone involved. There has been no public verification or follow up by any of those involved to my knowledge- the Oakland Undercurrent, USA Swimming or the East Bay Express. Typically I would expect nothing to come out because of pending legal matters, but in this case Sheppard says there is none. So what gives?

MSU Bears Men take the Northwestern TYR Invitational

2011-11-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

Yeah... I know what you're thinking. Who cares about the Bears. Right? I understand that this blog isn't supposed to be my MSU Bears showscase or anything, but as Supreme 2nd Assistant Editor in Chief of The Swim Brief blog, I wanted to take this special chance to rub the win in Mike Gustafson's grubby little face in the hopes of starting an annual MSU vs Northwestern blog fight.

The meet was close the whole way with the two teams trading the lead down to the end, and they threw in some pretty stellar swims along the way too. With such excellent competition, I hope my Bears head up there next year... but mostly so I have a reason to tell Mike to stick it.

Haha.

Results here if you're interested.

A totally informal interview with Susan Woessner

2011-11-16T11:01:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I talked on the phone with Susan Woessner for 50 minutes. I had planned to record the conversation, not to establish a record of everything that Susan had said, but so that I didn't misquote her on anything. Unfortunately, I discovered after the call that my recording had totally failed. In an effort to not let time skew what I remember about the call, I endeavored to write this blog right away so I didn't forget.

To start off with, this wasn't a formal interview. Susan said she was more interested in starting a dialogue, and although I'm writing about it on my blog, I don't consider myself a professional interviewer. We start by talking about culture change in swimming, although we had some disagreements about what that meant. To both of us, the clear change had to be in the reporting of abuse by athletes. Susan sees a clear path to changing this- the creation of an education component for USA Swimming athletes and coaches, as well as changes to the USA Swimming code of conduct that mandate reporting, as well as provide for the protection of good faith reporters. I still believe that the culture that has to change (and doesn't appear likely to) involves much larger changes at Colorado Springs. I told Susan candidly that I think a lack of trust for her employers is a major hindrance to complaints being brought to them. Abuse claims are drastically unreported. I think having new paid leadership at USA Swimming would go a long way to restarting that trust.

Susan walked me through the process of someone making a complaint. One of the questions I had was whether, if someone brought a complaint that included criminal behavior, she was obligated to instruct them to report it to police. She was emphatic that she would do so, and that she also kept track of relative mandatory reporting policies within different states and had aided people in understanding their legal obligations to report. If the complaint constitutes a possible code of conduct violation, she forwards that complaint to an independent investigator, who conducts an investigation and then completes an investigative report. USA Swimming Executive Director Chuck Wielgus and USA Swimming President Bruce Stratton each independently review the report and may request that the complaint be moved forward to a National Board of Review Hearing. If Wielgus and Stratton sign off, the National Board of Review conducts a hearing of USA Swimming v. the accused before a three person panel of two non-athlete members and one athlete member.

The biggest objection I had to this system is the same as above- if you don't trust the executive leadership at USA Swimming (Wielgus) or even the volunteer leadership (Stratton), then you won't trust this process. When she cited club development at one point during the conversation, I swallowed hard and asked her if Pat Hogan's relationship and subsequent marriage with one of his swimmers would be legal under the 2011 code of conduct. Susan declined to comment on Hogan.

Susan did point out to me that I have made little to no effort to be involved politically in USA Swimming. I am like somebody who protests about the US government but doesn't vote in elections. It's an issue I may be looking into, as I am a USA Swimming member coach.

I asked Susan fairly pointedly what kind of measures she was using to see if her office was successful. She said that she is receiving a high volume of calls, but couldn't say how many. She counted the amount of member (30,000) that had been through the new education programs, the 300 people who attended a "safe sport" presentation in Jacksonville and the one additional staff member that will make her a part of an athlete protection team as of December 1st. I was fairly critical at this point- particularly since I believe USA swimming could be producing estimates for how often abuse occurs and then measuring their success at detecting it. I suspect that USA swimming does not want to do this for the bad public relations it would engender. Susan disagrees, of course, and contends that we are only a year into the program and more measures could be forthcoming.

Another issue that we tackled was the general communications disconnect. Susan informed me that I should be getting weekly emails as a USA Swimming coach- I hear absolutely nothing from Colorado Springs. I encouraged Susan too to make the additions to the USA Swimming banned list more public- she informed me that this idea is being considered.

Overall it was a polite discussion and conversation not over by a longshot. I think one of the things that bias Susan and I are the very different experiences we had growing up in USA Swimming. Susan feels very positive about the time she spent as an athlete and employee there. She retired in 2004 having accomplished much and competed at very high levels. I suspect that at the level she competed at she saw a much different side of USA Swimming. By comparison, my own swimming career was fairly marginal- not even sectional level in high school. Over my 8 years in USA Swimming, I had over 10 different coaches. There were a couple good ones- but most were fairly lousy people. I can remember one coach confessing to me that he enjoyed making 13 year old girls cry, I love swimming but don't look fondly upon the majority of my time as a USA Swimming athlete.

Susan was most excited by the fact that she had been able to return to USA Swimming in this kind of role- a role that she knew she wanted to pursue professionally but didn't exist at USA Swimming. She feels strongly that USA Swimming is ahead of other olympic sports in their development. To this, I asked her if it was frustrating to read me complain about USA Swimming in my blog. She expressed frustration only that she didn't have a platform to respond directly.

I know some will read this blog and think I went "easy" on Susan, while still others will be angry that I continue to mistrust USA Swimming's leadership. Either way, know this: today two people who don't agree on everything managed to have a polite conversation about a pretty emotional issue.

Late Night Snack: A Feel Good Post

2011-11-15T16:52:00.000-08:00

Sheeeeeesh. When did things get so serious around here? I thought I'd throw up a small warm-fuzzy for everyone to say, "WE'RE BACK!" Happy 2011-2012 season, everyone.

This lovely little story comes to us from Howard County, Maryland. The Columbia Association has announced a blocked-off time for "Women Only Swimming." The need for this comes from Howard County's growing Muslim population and the fact that many Muslim women felt uncomfortable swimming in a co-ed situation but they very much wanted to swim. The Columbia Association felt that not only Muslim women had a need for a "women's only" swim time but other women might also feel more comfortable swimming at these times for other personal reasons. The reserved times are scheduled during "slower" parts of the day.

New York City Parks and Recreation also has "women only" swim times at the Metropolitan Recreation Center and some universities are also implementing a blocked-off time for women only. At George Washington, some complained citing concerns over the program "infringing on other's civil liberties."

Personally, I think this is nice. It brings a population to the pool that would otherwise be excluded. I have always found the swimming community to be especially inclusive and this is yet another example. There will be arguments against this, I'm sure. I just like how the swimming community opens itself up to people from all walks of life. Water is universal. So throw on those "burqinis" ladies and get in the pool!!

A Talk With Susan Woessner

2011-11-14T08:04:00.001-08:00

After my last blog, I received a fairly surprising e-mail. It was from Susan Woessner, USA Swimming's athlete protection officer. Susan didn't reference the blog that I had just written drawing parallels between what's going on at Penn State right now and USA Swimming. I assumed that had to do with why she was writing. I was surprised that Susan contacted me because I had the impression that USA Swimming was walling itself off from the outside. Susan disagrees pretty strongly with that contention, and I think that her willingness to reach out is a direct attempt to change that perception. She's already started to do that.

I called Susan today. We both admitted up front that we were pretty nervous. Susan, although she didn't say why, was probably nervous because of how critical I have been of USA Swimming in this space. I was nervous because I am acutely aware of the fact that continuing to be critical of the most powerful people in swimming in the United States probably isn't great for my career.

I put Susan at ease by telling her that I wasn't a professional journalist. I'm also not in the business of putting her in a trap and doing my best to make her look bad. I've written as much in various comment sections, but I think that Susan is highly competent and I'm glad that her office exists. The fact that Susan is actively reaching out is evidence that she is passionate about what she's doing. She relayed that in our conversation today- she is eager to get a message out about all that is changing.

We only had about fifteen minutes to talk, so we agreed to chat again. I told Susan I had a lot of tough questions. As I said, I'm not interested in trapping her, so I'm going to give her questions ahead of time so she can prepare her response. If you have something you'd like to ask Susan, feel free to leave it in the comments section of this blog. I have a feeling where she would like the conversation to go, and I would be happy to report on some really positive stuff in this space. At the same time, there are some tough questions that deserve an answer, and I hope she can provide those. Check back later this week for a recap of my conversation with Susan.

Bears in Briefs: or "Why I Can't keep My Mouth Shut Anymore."

2011-11-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

This is the proof that I was there.

Fine. I have been awakened from my stress-induced blog-hibernation. I can't keep my big fat trap shut anymore. Last month I wrote up a blog out of frustration but I didn't post it. Upon re-reading it I decided that I was being petty and I was letting the distant past taint my typically fair and balanced view of collegiate swimming.

The blog I wrote was about my beloved alma mater, the Missouri State Bears, winning the Men's side of the Show-Me Showdown, an early season meet between every college swim team, at every level, in the state of Missouri. My Bears pulled off the upset and beat the nationally ranked Missouri Tigers. Hells yeah!

There is a great rivalry there with an awesome history. Well, maybe not so awesome... the Tigers never seem to want to admit when the Bears beat them. In 1992, MU tried to cheat at the SIU invite by putting their stud sprinter in too many events and our fearless leader Jack Steck went apeshit. He is called the Bobby Knight of swimming because of days like this you know. That was Brian Hoffer's first year on the job and even after that incident I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He seemed like a nice enough guy. He backed down and we went home with the better score. Water under the bridge, right?

Then a few years later, when the new Mizzou pool was built and they hosted the first Show-Me Showdown, they were too embarrassed that their men got beat by the Bears-- so they decided to go against the meet info and score an exhibition event so that they could win a meet they had actually lost. That sent the Bears home with a bad taste in their mouth. Tiger blood tastes kind of sour I guess. Everyone there knew they won, but who do you report it to when the host team changes the rules?

Ya know, if my school had just built me a big, fancy multi-million dollar pool I might feel compelled to put a spin on the results of the maiden voyage... but I probably wouldn't tell an outright lie. That just sucks.

That's okay. We got beat by MU once during my four year career as a Bear. If we won all the time it wouldn't be much of a rivalry, right?

Anyway, this year MU and MSU are back to racing again after a few seasons of well needed cool-off time. They had been refusing to match-up in recent years. Coach Rhodenbaugh and Coach Steck finally decided to set bad blood aside and resume competition. Wonderful! I have heard great things about Roddy and have already seen Mizzou move into uncharted territory in his first season. I thought maybe the Tigers had grown up a little with new leadership. Apparently not, though, as when the Bears' men won the Show-Down in October 2011 the results were awfully hard to find on-line. As a matter of fact, when I finally found them they had no scores attached. AND... two newspapers in Columbia, Missouri reported that Mizzou won both the Men's and Women's divisions of the meet!

What?! The Bears and their group of nervous underclassmen bested Mizzou by over 60 points!? Since when is that second place?

Still, I wanted to give Roddy the benefit of the doubt. I mean, it really could have been a miscommunication. We all know campus and community papers like to report about the 20 IM and the 400 breach-stroke and other stupid careless crap all the time. One of the newspapers did make a correction to their online paper the next day after taking complaints. Maybe it was just a freshman reporter being an idiot and wasn't a reflection of the MU program. Maybe Coach Rod had nothing to do with it. I typed up that blog but never posted it. I held my tongue.

But alas... No. last night my blood boiled. You see, this week Coach Steck was thrilled to be hosting Mizzou once again at Hammons Student Center Pool. It had been a few years since they dualed. With a new coach and new team, he was excited that they were going to come down to the ghetto and be forced to wonder how a team with so little advantages can be so fast. The MSU pool is an out-dated bunker compared to the MU pool. Every detail is pathetic in contrast. Their budget is a mere fraction of that of the Tigers. There were many in our state political base who wanted to keep MSU down, forcing the school to continue as SW Missouri State forever, because Mizzou Alumni were offended that a school so much less impressive could share their status as a major state school. The name change finally happened, but MSU is still considered the underdog in nearly every rivalry they have ever had. They are scrappers. They are junkyard dogs. They always are in a position to have to prove themselves.

...and Coach Rodenbaugh's troops-- they showed up at this dual that they could have played off as insignificant, fully dressed for battle. They wore brand new LZR's right out of the box! Championship meet suits! The Bears took them on in briefs!

I ain't making this up. They essentially showed up at a
knife fight with a gun-- which is a nice compliment to my Bears, I guess.

The biggest reason I am pissed?... This was stacked up to be an awesome dual on the men's side: Their 400 free and 400 medley relays were both 3:22 and 3:03 on the season. These were two very evenly matched teams and this should have been a barn-burner of a meet. If I had paid for admission, I would have felt ripped-off. Every Mizzou male had his thighs covered with compression fabric. (Well, except for the divers of course.) Every MU man and woman but one, Dominique Bouchard, had a LZR on, and Bouchard just happened to get embarrassingly reeled in on the last 50 of the 200 fly by MSU's Roni Balzam on her way to setting the pool record with her 2:04.59. MSU set another meet record on the men's side when Vitaly Baryshok swam 1:38.22 in the 200 free, one of his three individual wins of the night in a brief.

Of course, in a meet with 18 pool records set between men and women, those were lost amongst the mess of an outrageously fast dual. An unnaturally fast in-season dual, I should say. Results are here.

Sorry if I seem overly bitter. I don't want to sound like a sore loser and I certainly don't want anyone to think my attitude has anything to do with the feelings of the MSU coaching staff. I just, well... as a loyal alum, I can't help but feel robbed. When people look at the score of this dual, and see it as an overwhelming win for the Tigers, I want them to know that the playing field was not level. So many times as a mid-major, the Bears have been accused of resting and shaving and suiting up when they pull off the win against a Goliath. I want to make sure that everyone sees this. MSU is a damn good team this year, and they are capable of hanging with even a top 25 ranked team like Mizzou. This meet was closer than the score indicates, and I only wish Mizzou had the nuggets to face their ever-underdog in-state rival with all things equal. Of course, then they would have to admit that this lowly mid-major is a respectable rival, and that just wouldn't be prudent for a big time program moving into the SEC, would it?

This was dirty pool and I ain't afraid to say it. Coach Rhodenbaugh, please!... The next time you face my Bears, treat them with the respect they have been earning for decades. This rivalry deserves that. My generation, and those before and after mine, deserve better. Jack deserved better treatment in his final season. I don't claim to understand your motivation for wearing your fancy pants last night, but I can't help feeling utterly let-down with the feeling that fair play was not honored.

Sound familiar?

2011-11-09T08:44:00.000-08:00

There's so much going on today, I struggled to pick one topic. Maryland Swimming is under serious threat, a prospect that is completely terrifying. The first set of College dual meet rankings is set to be released later in the day. But you won't hear about either of those things if you turn on sports center. The sports world's gaze is firmly fixed on State College, PA. But this is a swimming blog! And still it might be the most important swimming topic of the day.

For those that haven't been following, news broke over the weekend that long time Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky would be indicted for committing sexual crimes against minors. That part of the story should be all too familiar to the swimming community, as the details of allegations against Sandusky poured out. They detailed how he used his position of authority and children's charity to get access to and abuse children.

Equally troubling are the indictments of two Penn State officials, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice President Gary Schultz. Both are alleged to have been given a first hand account of Sandusky having anal sex with a ten year old boy, but the only action they took was to ban Sandusky from Penn State main campus facilities. Head football coach, Joe Paterno and Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant who reported the incident to Paterno and the administration, aren't in any legal trouble, but they certainly are in moral trouble over their hesitance to do anything more than send it one step up the line.

It's both heartening and depressing to see the response. After "nothing to see here" response from Penn State president Graham Spanier, the board of trustees stepped in and seem to be moving swiftly to hold the administrators accountable. Is there even one person in a position of significant power in swimming that has taken action to hold coaches accountable? Or are they all in "nothing to see here" mode?

The masses seem to have no trouble publicly calling for the heads of Paterno and others. In swimming the response to our powerful people putting themselves before victims remains largely muted. The public outcry has already yield a pretty dramatic outcome: Paterno announced as I was writing this blog that he would be retiring at the end of the year. It may not be enough, but the thought of Paterno stepping away was pretty unthinkable a week ago.

There are certainly some positives to swimming existing mostly far out of the limelight. It keeps the majority of our athletes fairly well grounded. It means that as a college coach, I get to coach student athletes rather than running a minor league for the pros. The down side is this- there is almost no one outside of swimming to hold the most powerful people in our sport accountable. When Joe Paterno is in trouble, he has to hide from a ravenous media that wants him to answer the hard questions. When Chuck Wielgus is under fire, he gets lobbed a few softballs from Swimming World Magazine, shuts down access to anyone else and we're all supposed to forget it ever happened.

Penn State is a lesson to the swimming community- but is anyone listening?

Ian Thorpe Comeback a Total Failure

2011-11-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

The following is a guest blog from Tom Duke. For full bios of our guest bloggers, click here

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Today, the illustrious Ian Thorpe made his comeback to swimming. Thorpe, formerly the undisputed greatest swimmer in the Commonwealth (and by default, the world) once dazzled us with his middle distance freestyle virtuosity. Then a large eared american blowhard named Michael Phelps, tempered only by the coaching genius of Bob Bowman, unseated the king. Thorpe retired to a life of tabloid speculation over his waist line and sexuality. As fun as that sounds, he decided to make a comeback, if for no other reason than to get people talking about his swimming for a little. His first meet was today, and I am already declaring his comeback a total failure.

What's that you say? I am rushing to judgment? No sir, I'm not even crawling to judgment. The result is plane for all to see. Ian Thorpe swam the 100 IM and suffered the ignominious fate of a 7th place finish. 7th place! It's a result that can only raise questions about whether or not Thorpe was doping during his halcyon days. Those of you who were there, like this humble registrar of swimming data, remember that Thorpe made his international breakthrough at the 1998 World Championships, the same meet where China's Zeng Qiliang won silver in the 100 breaststroke. In 1994 the Chinese swimming team befouled the sport with their blatant disregard for doping regulations. Therefore Thorpe cannot be above suspicion.

While it is true that Thorpe was never really an IM specialist, nor was sprinting his namesake for any part of his career, his coach Gennadi Touretski claimed earlier this year that he had the greatest butterfly in the world. Since Gennadi Touretski coached the greatest athlete ever in the universe Alex Popov, he is incapable of lying. Therefore, Thorpe is a total failure, in that even with the greatest butterfly in the world he could not beat Omar Pinzon in 100 IM.

Thorpe should consider conceding tomorrows 100 butterfly before he brings more shame to his once great career. Unfortunately, he probably won't, and he will continue torturing us with his poor performances for the rest of this olympic year. A sad, sad tragedy of misfortune.

About those deadlines...

2011-11-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

"If you hang up this phone, the offer is gone"

That's the line that many college prospects are facing and have faced over the last few weeks. In the cutthroat world of college recruiting, deadlines are an effective way for schools to get commitments. While the above is perhaps the most extreme example, most scholarship schools use deadlines to varying degrees. If you're a prospect or parent (or even a college coach) you may be wondering why.

The reason is simple. Most schools over-recruit. The process is similar to filling job positions. When you have one job opening, you don't only interview one candidate. You likely interview several. Ultimately you will decide who you want the most and offer them the position. They may say yes, and you can give every other applicant your regrets. Or they say no, and you move on to the next person down the line.

But the college recruiting system for swimming has a few more variables. For one, the list of openings can be somewhat fluid, depending on roster caps or minimums. And unlike most job systems where there is a somewhat structured pay range, college swimming programs are free to cut up pieces of scholarship cake however they want.

If a college coach puts a swimmer on a deadline, it is because they are interested in having that swimmer above a group of other swimmers they are currently recruiting. They want a final answer on whether they can have the swimmer so they can either move on to plan B (or C, hopefully not D). Therefore, it's easy to understand why some colleges are in such a rush. Everything else they do hinges on each particular commitment as they try to construct a recruiting class.

At the same time, I think that there is a right and wrong length for these deadlines. Deadlines like the one that led this post off or of 24 hours are unfair to the prospect making the decision. They are not against NCAA rules. They prey on the natural loss aversion of humans. Prospects are put in a position where they may be sacrificing something if they don't say yes in a very compressed time.

Whenever we negotiate with prospects at Georgia Tech, we typically set deadlines of 1-2 weeks. They are also often open for negotiation with the prospect. Sometimes I wonder if we are being naive in not setting more extreme deadlines. Are we costing ourselves in the competitive landscape? I can see the other side of the coin: extracting commitments with high pressure tactics can't always yield good long term results.

If you're reading this, where do you stand on deadlines? What is fair to the coach and what is fair to the prospect? What gets the best long term results?

Are SCM World Records Easier?

2011-10-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

This woman has a SCM world record. Do you know who she is?

Before we begin- let me assure you all that I will resume posting in earnest in approximately two weeks. Why? Because the fall signing period will arrive and I will have my life back again. Until then, please feel free to do exactly what I'm doing and head on over to www.theswimmerscircle.com. Also, forgive them for their overly long URL. Today, I'm rousing myself up to post because of something I read there. Something that I disagree with.

I'm hear to talk about their announcement of Missy Franklin's WR 200 backstroke. I'm not going to comment on Franklin herself for fear that NCAA president Mark Emmert will send his secret police to "disappear" me. In the opening line, Braden Keith states:

"If you thought the long course World Records were difficult to break, the short course World Records are even tougher. All of the extra walls, where the polyurethane suits gave an extra advantage, made for some absurdly fast times"

Stop the presses. SCM world records are tougher? I disagree. I understand the point that Braden is making but I think that the post misstates just how fragile SCM world records can be. Let's look at a little data.

Looking at the 200 backstroke world record progression (from Wikipedia) we can see that the long course world record in the 200 backstroke stood very recently for a 17 year period, from 1991 to 2008. The page only charts the 200 backstroke world record from 2001 on, but lists four record breaking swims since that time. The long course 200 back changed hands four times over roughly the same time period.

Looking for more evidence? Check out some of the other events. While a ton of attention was put on Ryan Lochte's world record 200 IM swim this past summer, there was much less fanfare when in December of 2010 he lowered the world record by nearly 1.5 seconds in the short course version of the race. Which record do you think was harder to break. In one race, he rested the world record from himself (and Phelps before that). Can you guess the other? It was Darian Townsend, a fine swimmer but certainly not a Phelps or Lochte.

Short course world records have always been fairly haphazard, and with good reason. Few swimmers organize their training schedules around the biggest short course meets. The result is such that many of the SCM world records fall into two categories. Either they are held by swimmers who are majorly better at short course and thus put all of their stock into short course season (Peter Mankoc being the best recent example). Or they are set by the best swimmers in the world simply swimming another meet with a little bit of rest (see Lochte's 200 IM above).

To conclude, I think that the next few years are going to find that SCM world records are broken with more frequency than LCM records, simply because of their haphazard nature.

Just one man's opinion. I'm going to go back to sleep now.

A Brief Conversation About The Michael Phelps Video Game

2011-10-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

Friend: "Turn on the TV."

Me: "Why?"

Friend: "Michael Phelps is on."

Me: "What's he doing?"

Friend: "Flailing his arms."

Me: "Is he swimming?"

Friend: "No."

Me: "Then why is he flailing his arms?"

Friend: "It's for a video game he's demonstrating on Jimmy Fallon."

Pause.

Me: "What?"

Friend: "It's a swimming video game."

Me: "How does it work?"

Friend: "Why won't you just turn on the TV?"

Me: "I'm lazy."

Friend: "Then you wouldn't like this game."

Me: "I like games."

Friend: "You move around in this game."

Me: "Does it have tubes of water in your face?"

Friend: "No."

Me: "Does it make you wear a Speedo?"

Friend: "No."

Me: "Does it make you throw up on Christmas morning?"

Friend: "No."

Pause.

Me: "Maybe I would like it."

Friend: "Totally."

These Hands

2011-10-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

Nothing has ever come easy for my girls. Born more than 10 weeks prematurely they weighed 2lbs each when they were born. They spent their first few months in the hospital; tubes, needles, wires. Monitors incessantly beeping. Sometimes the monitors became frenzied, a baby was crashing. Doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists. Hand washing, the smell of disinfectant. All my girls have scars from their time in the NICU on their hands and feet. Their physical tolerance from pain is unusual and I've been told it's due to the "programming" their little nervous systems endured from their first couple of months. Sometimes I'm like, "seriously, that had to hurt." It's made them tough. Tough in many ways.

Upon discharge from the hospital we entered the realm known as "early childhood intervention." Occupational therapy, developmental therapy, speech and language and, of course, physical therapy. Everything happened but it took extraordinary effort; rolling over, grasping, crawling, babbling, first words, walking. Hours and hours and hours and hours. When they girls turned 1 we knew Kate was on a different trajectory but that Charlotte and Anna would be okay. We continued. Preschool. More therapy. Finally, entering kindergarden and the final evaluation. Charlotte and Anna no longer qualified for services. They no longer were "disabled." They were.......okay.

I waited to put them in swim lessons until they were 7. They probably could have started earlier but, whatever. Swimming is the only sport they ever wanted to try. Soccer? No thanks. Softball? No. "Mom, we want to swim." Perhaps I was too sensitive to being a "swage" mom (my combination for swim/stage mom) due to my own interest in the sport and maybe I had some PTSD from their early history but last fall we finally began swim lessons. They did really well through freestyle and backstroke, flip turns and racing starts and then.....breaststroke.

Seriously, what the hell.

According to Wikipedia, the history of the breaststroke goes back to the Stone Age. Somewhere in Egypt, near Libya, there's a "Cave of Swimmers" with drawings of Fred and Barney doing their best Kitajima impersonation. It should have stayed in the Stone Age. Extreme prematurity and a higher-ordered multiple birth wasn't going to conquer us but breaststroke sure as hell was. Between getting the timing down and the kick. *sigh* "The teacher says I'm scissor kicking" they'd tell me. "Yeah, well keep it in your back pocket for when you really need it like at a World Championship" I'd mutter under my breath. Honestly, I didn't have a lot constructive to say so I stayed supportive and encouraging. I took them to the Indy Grand Prix. I showed them Lochte's tweet from Nationals, his call for help regarding breaststroke. I told them everyone has a hard time with certain things, everyone has something they really work hard on....even Olympians. So they worked. They continued to try.

So this past Monday was report card day. I could sense their excitement tinged with a hint of apprehension. Since spring they've stayed in "level 5" while watching others move up. I told them it didn't matter what level they were in and for how long-what mattered is that they learned the stroke. Honestly, I saw kids being moved up that weren't ready but I think there was pressure from the parents to move them up (allegedly.) (Ahem.) The swim coach had told me the week before that they were moving up but I waited until they came running up to me with their wet report cards clenched in their soaked cold little hands.......

.....The same hands scarred by needles, the same hands that were once so small. They're bigger hands now. Stronger. They're the hands that inspire me and some days lead me to insanity. They're the hands of my heros who have worked so hard to accomplish what comes so naturally to others......those hands .....are moving onto butterfly now.

Gus Needs Help

2011-10-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

Of course I do. That's not the issue.

What I really need are YOUR resources. I'm starting a column over at USA Swimming which follows the experiences of four Olympic Trials qualifiers. Please check out my "Open Letter to USA Swimming Members" here.

Do you know anyone who's got a great story, and has also qualified for the Olympic Trials? GIVE ME THEIR NAMES. NUMBERS. EMAILS. AND A LIST OF THEIR PERSONAL FEARS.

Kidding about the fears. But the rest, please forward on to me. I've set up an email for this project -- Trials.Tribulations.2012[at]gmail.com. Any help or leads or pointing in the right direction would be of great benefit to me. Hopefully this can be a cool project. And if it's not, I will blame all of you. Personally.

Thanks for reading this. Now get back to work, people.

Headcases: Does Swim Training Make You Crazy?

2011-10-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

If you've been involved with swimming, you probably know one or more swimmers that has been labeled a "headcase". It's possible that term hasn't been used, that they've been described as someone who crumbles under pressure at the end of the season, or doesn't race up to the potential of their training. Their coach might say "if only he/she could get out of his/her own way she would do well". I've been playing around with a theory regarding this for the last few weeks. I think, in many cases, describing a swimmer as a "headcase" belies a total misunderstanding of how they got that way. Let me explain

There is near universal acceptance in the coaching community about the importance of psychological preparation for racing. We say "the sport is 90% mental" or maybe even "95% mental". We talk about "mental toughness". Most coaches know a mentally prepared swimmer when they see one, but how many know exactly how they got there?

I believe a great many swimmers labor under a system that is designed to make them "headcases". The biggest culprit in my mind is progressive overload training. What do I mean by "progressive overload"? I mean the process of working through a cycle that puts a swimmer through progressively more and more training (loading) before finally allowing them to fully recover or taper in this instance. If everything goes right, faster performance will follow.

Progressive overload works very well with swimmers with high recovery levels and abilities to process blood lactate. That is why we have seen swimmers like Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte be incredibly successful by training with progressive overload. Their ability to recover allows them to continuously adapt while putting themselves through training that would otherwise break them.

The problem I see is that many swimmers do not take to progressive overload training as well. They cannot adapt and perform increasingly worse over the period of training. Psychologically, they have to overcome declining or stagnating performance over the course of an entire season and then believe that they can swim much faster. That belief is achievable but fairly irrational. That's where you find a lot of swimmers struggling to do well at the end of the season.

Many coaches probably want swimmers to make a connection between their practice training and meet performance. The problem is that almost all training models don't correlate directly with performance. When I swam in college, we did 10x300 on :20 rest as a "test set" for our conditioning. But the set didn't correlate directly to any swimming race we actually competed in. At best it was a measure of our ability to swim a 3000 for time. I think many swimmers understand innately that they are making an apples to oranges comparison between practice and meets.

Therefore, it's incumbent upon coaches to give swimmers a chance to perform well during the season. This gives them a performance to base their belief on. I actually think that multiple chances are better. Swimmers don't have to "best times" in their first meet of the year, but they should be prepared to swim better than they did at that same point the previous year and improve on that over the course of the season before they ultimately taper. In a college setting, this means for me that I want my swimmers to perform well in the first dual meet and better in each subsequent meet, which is no easy task. What "well" and "better" are for each swimmer should be defined by the coach and the swimmer.

And that, folks, is what I'm ranting about at the moment.

Technology and the Swim Coach

2011-09-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

Sarah Connor was totally over-reacting about the whole "skynet" thing. The machines ain't taking over squat.

Really? Some day we are all going to be replaced by fancy micro-chip powered robots? That's funny. In my experience, technology seems to do nothing but fail. I ain't worried about the machines taking over... half the time they can't even run a darn swim meet.

Last week my computer crashed. No big deal. Happens all the time with the humidity at the pool. I only expect to get about a year out of a desktop. I save my files on zip drives and I actually had another desktop with Windows XP loaded just in case. I had saved all of the disks to load the programs I need and spent just about a whole school day installing the stuff I need to run my meets: Hy-tek's Team Manager and Meet Manager and Adobe Acrobat.

Of course, that computer quit working the next morning. FAIL.

So I bit the bullet and got permission to buy a brand new desktop. Surely a new computer will solve it, right? I shopped around for a deal and found a great Compaq tower, but when I tried to set it up I realized that new is absolutely not better. It only has USB ports which rendered my laser printer worthless and left me without a serial com port to hook up my Colorado System 5. It also left me with useless install disks because Windows 7 is not compatible with my versions of Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works.

Whoa... I am already the most expensive guy in the district. Do I really need to ask for more stuff?

Our school district runs on Macs. Because most of my work is done on Hy-tek, I use a PC, and our tech crew lets me do my own thing. I asked for disks to install new versions of the program and heard back a couple of days later that they couldn't find what I need. Luckily, another teacher had the Adobe disk I needed.

Now, I know some companies are difficult to work with: I bought an adaptor for serial (com) to usb, and when that didn't work, both Hy-tek and Colorado Timing told me it was the other company's problem. Colorado even told me that they can't really talk to me about it because they no longer support MM 3.0, which I bought less than a year ago, and if I wanted help I need to buy 4.0. What a racket!

Sure, I can see why those two companies might not like each other, since they reluctantly have to depend on one another in the swim business-- but Adobe? I think they just hate people in general. For me to install Acrobat I had to verify that I am a teacher. I kid you not, I had to fill out all sorts of stuff, including sending them a copy of one of my check stubs and verifying what store it was purchased from. They really didn't want me to install their program. After jumping through all of their hoops, they still told me it would take their verification team a few days to approve me. I gave up. I told them if they can't help me in time for my meet, I don't ever want to do business with them again. As of right now. I can't send a psyche sheet out to the coaches coming to my meet tomorrow.

Even if it was all working right and I tested it before every meet, something technological will go wrong at every meet. I actually tested my whole system for our first dual meet this year before the computer crashed and it was fine, only to have my Colorado start console die in a horribly embarrassing, delay-of-meet-for-over-an-hour sort of way. It is a damn good thing they gave me the good pain pills when I broke my hand. (Oh yeah, I got the pins taken out yesterday. Check out the video at this link.)

I think after my Invitational this Saturday, maybe I will have one of them Office Space parties... you know, where we take my old start console, my old desktop, my old install disks, my old printer, and maybe even a few lifeless customer service agents from some choice software companies, and let out a little stress. Wanna join me?

Pardon the language on the video. I couldn't find a clean version. Haha.

Praise for USA Swimming's Education Program

2011-09-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

If you've read the title, I can understand how you'll be a little startled. Over the course of writing this blog I've been very critical of USA Swimming in regards to their attitude towards child protection. Yesterday, as is now required of me to be a USA Swimming coach, I completed an education program regarding child protection that USA Swimming has set up with it's partner, Praesidium. And guess what? I thought it was pretty good.

Before I get into what I liked about it, I do have a few quibbles. The education program has six components. The first one feels utterly out of place and pointless. It educates you on the history of swimming and has a bunch of fluff about USA Swimming. It feels tacked on to create what I've heard referred to as the "sandwich". Said sandwich is a technique for delivering really bad news. If you put something really positive before and after something really negative, maybe it won't sound so bad. In much the same way as putting some putrid meat product between two slices of heavenly bread. But the entire section has literally nothing to do with educating coaches about protecting children and feels like it was written by public relations.

What follows is sorely needed and valuable. The presentation is fairly detailed, going through and overview of child sexual abuse, then following a more detailed progression. The presentation talks about the reasons abuse may occur, how the abuse may develop (grooming), and steps you can and should take to prevent and report it. Interspersed are interviews with what I assume are actually people convicted of sexual crimes against minors, although some seemed more authentic than others. Victims of crimes were also included but seemed more like actors, which is understandable and probably appropriate.

The program also had some nifty design features to mitigate a coach mindlessly skipping through the presentation. A lot of the video presentations were not optional- they played with no recourse to skip over them. When text was displayed on screen, you were forced to stay on screen for enough time to actually read the text before moving on. Now, if you really desperately didn't want to participate you could get away with it, but I appreciate this little detail.

Now, the other end of the aforementioned sandwich was actually valuable. It talked about the really positive impact coaches can have. Some may argue that it distracts from the child protection message, but I would argue that giving examples of good coaching is an essential part of the program. The acting in it was a little painful, but I'll get over it.

Overall, it's a little step but one that makes me hopeful. I don't know how similar the education program is for athletes but I am hopeful that it will provide same level of information I received so that they can know what behaviors are beyond reasonable boundaries. There is still a lot of work to do, but this is one very positive step in the right direction.

Oh, Hey Pitt!

2011-09-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

I was enjoying a brief respite this weekend from what has been a far busier fall than I anticipated. Of course, when you have a smart phone you are always sort of at work. An e-mail flashed into my inbox. Pitt and Syracuse were joining the ACC.

You'll notice that I left Syracuse out of the title. It's not a snub at their recently departed swimming program. It's more at their University for shamefully dropping swimming. Although the details have yet to be hammered out, it appears that Pitt will be the newest ACC team.

This morning, I figured I would rouse myself from my Gustafson-level posting frequency to comment. Major media outlets will focus on the football and basketball implications. But you don't care about that, right? Well, maybe you do, but you at least sorta care about the swimming right?

Pitt will fit in very well in the ACC right now. They have traditionally competed against ACC teams (UVA most frequently), they bring another nice facility into the league, and academically they are very comparable to the rest of the schools in the league. The geography will be a little strange, but they are way closer to the rest of the league than BC is and could\probably swim Virginia Tech, UVA and Maryland each year.

It also will provide a nice bolster for the ACC, which is saying goodbye to Clemson after this coming season. The ACC is probably fourth out of the five "power" conferences, and could be "last" if the Big East ceases to exist.

From a recruiting perspective, I think that Pitt gains more from entering the ACC then the rest of the league gains from their presence. Western Pennsylvania has always been a strong recruiting area, and UVA in particular has made a killing recruiting in that area. I don't expect that to change. Pitt, however, will gain from being in a league that has a presence up and down the east coast.

Everyone seems to think that Pitt won't be forced to wait the compulsory 27 months to switch leagues, so we could see them at the ACC championship come 2013. From what I'm reading today, there could be more. I only wish we could get a cooler team like the Screaming Viking's alma mater Missouri State, but you can't get everything you want.

Could the PAC-12 TV Deal Bring Back Husky Swimming?

2011-09-14T06:39:00.000-07:00

Do they have a chance to get back in the race?

I just wanted to point out a link today from the Seattle PI in which the author, who plainly states that he doesn't give a rip about swimming, speaks up to support bringing our beloved Husky swim programs back. He states that since the University of Washington blamed hard financial times as the culprit forcing them to cut the mens and womens swimming programs for a whopping 1.2 million in savings, they really don't have any reason to not bring them back. They just landed a sweet tv deal in which they will bring in about 12 million annually over what they previously received.

From the article:

"So, I understand why Woodward killed the swimming program in 2009, but now? Now that they are knee-deep in greenbacks because of someone else’s business acumen (read: the aforementioned Larry Scott) it would be embarrassing for the UW if they continued to ignore their castaway. It not only would appear greedy, it would simply be an overt gesture of greed.
If the excuse for killing the program before was lack of funds, what’s the excuse now?"

Amen brother!! The only problem is, the author probably isn't aware of the history there. Admin had been trying to kill swimming at UW for decades and finally had a financial crisis to fall back on as an excuse. I would do anything to see the Huskies back in the water, but I really worry that the thought won't even occur to them. Maybe now is the time for the swim community to rally and make them aware that we know the money problems are gone and this wrong should be made right.

Don't forget, the Husky Swimming Foundation is still fighting the good fight. Let them know you still care by making a donation or supporting their events.

.

British Comedy, Swimming and Charity. What's Not To Love Here?

2011-09-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

David Wallliams swimming past my brother's house this past weekend for Sport Relief

David Walliams, actor and comedian best known for the BBC show "Little Britain" (and Little Britain USA on HBO) swam the length of the Thames, about 135 miles total, for the British charity Sport Relief. The swim took him 8 days to complete. He said he was in tremendous pain and he and was warned by the health authorities he'd be swimming through sewage. Sure 'nuff, on day 3 it resulted in a bad case of "Thames Tummy" and yet kept calm and carried on (get it? get it?) He raised over $2 million.

Sport Relief is associated with Comic Relief (which if you're American of a certain age you may be having flashbacks of Whoopie Goldberg and Billy Crystal doing jokes about homelessness in acid wash jeans) and BBC Sport. Sport Relief raises millions and millions for causes in the UK including: bringing sports into lower income communities, mental health treatment, support for domestic abuse and sexual abuse survivors as well as worldwide funding schools for girls, clean water programs and free trade initiatives.

Good stuff. Why don't we have anything like this in the States? The NFL has charities as does the NBA but there is no national, all sport, all inclusive charity which also brings in entertainment. Phelps vs Shaq was great television. Millions watched and millions of dollars could have been raised. In America we're very good at bringing everyone together after national emergencies and global tragedies. What I love about this is it's a national movement. People hang red noses on their doors, school children hold "sport days," there's a mile walk, there's usually a telethon of sorts with great clips like these:

James Corden (aka "Smithy") and Beckham

James Corden and Tom Daley

We want to grow the sport? I think this is a great way to do it. Everybody wins. This country can use a little "feel good" about now. I know Mel Stewart agrees with me. He's written about this on his blog, too. http://www.goldmedalmel.typepad.com/mel/2011/09/the-uk-knows-how-to-entertain-we-love-their-films-and-short-run-shows-in-the-states-we-gobble-them-up-and-reharsh-winners.html In the meantime, expect to see David Walliams be given an OBE (Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth soon. Well done. If you're interested in learning more about Sport Relief you can find it here http://www.sportrelief.com/#tab3 and big thanks to my brother, Gavin, for letting me use his picture.

Nighttime Snack: Top Ten Public Pools in the World!

2011-09-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

This one's in Denmark so even DeSantis can enjoy!

I have a new bucket list. Yahoo has come out with a list of the "Top Ten Pools Even Nobodies And Losers Can Use" and every single one looks amazing. The link is here http://travel.yahoo.com/p-interests-40677568 and if you click on it you'll never want to go to the Y ever again.

Can We Please Admit We Have a Problem?

2011-09-08T10:01:00.000-07:00

When I read yesterday that Ben Sheppard, USA Swimming's (now former) Diversity Consultant and club coach in the Oakland area, had been fired, I have to admit I wasn't that shocked. I wasn't shocked because I know that there are far more coaches that have inappropriate sexual interactions with their swimmers than have been "caught" That is pretty depressing. Sheppard wasn't someone I knew well, or at all, but he was a facebook friend. In this weird new era, Ben Sheppard and I were "friends" although I never recall having a conversation with him.

And now he has been suspended from his club and fired from USA Swimming, according to the article linked to above. The allegations against Sheppard center around facebook messages to swimmers. If there's a silver lining in this story, it's that the young girls that made the report understood that what they were being sent was not right. That's not insignificant.

The title of this post is devoted to the fact that we, as a swimming community, still seem to be in denial. There is no question in my mind that despite all attempts to cast this as a "societal problem", its far more frequent in swimming than in general. It's a big problem and we could do a lot more to solve it if we actually admitted that it existed.

The problem is, of course, that USA Swimming is being sued and part of that lawsuit hinges on sexual abuse being prevalent in swimming. So the denial will continue, even from sensible people in the organization who know exactly what is going on. If and when USA Swimming verifies the accusations against Sheppard, there will be a concerted effort to not discuss the matter.

But as the frequent refrain goes, admitting you have a problem is only the first step. USA Swimming has taken action, most of it in the form of creating more hoops for coaches to jump through in order to be on deck. I would like to see USA Swimming tackle this topic from another angle, a more positive one. Let's do more to encourage the right people to be on deck with kids.

Right now, swim coaching is disproportionately represented by unmarried men. Why? Just read fellow blogger Shawn Klosterman's post from earlier this week if you want to know the particular stress coaching swimming can put on having a family. Or ask almost any coach. Not every coach works the kind of insane hours that Shawn works, but most coaches work during times that other professionals are likely to have "off", nights and weekends. That's time you can use to have a normal social life. With a summer season that cuts clear into the middle of August, there's no true "off season" for swimming.

And the above only addresses issues that coaches of any gender face. Women coaches are under even more pressure, and in my opinion that they are fewer in number. If you somehow pass through all the above as a female and get married and want to have a family, there is absolutely no "good" time of year for you to have a baby. Swimming has lost a ton of great coaches because the structure of our sport put women in such a precarious position.

I don't pretend to have all the solutions, but I think some creative reform could tackle this issue from another angle, and ultimately make swimming in general better. At the same time we are cracking down on coaches who misbehave, we must also make a concerted effort to buoy coaches who are doing the right thing.

View From the Stands: A Swim Fan's Survival Guide to "Off Season"

2011-09-07T04:38:00.000-07:00

The Minnesota Grand Prix is 64 days away

The other night I found myself watching swimming on You Tube. At one point I said to myself, "this must have been what it was like during the Great Depression when people ate rutabagas they grew in their front yard and made clothes out of potato sacks." I wondered if there were Hoovervilles for swim fans where we could all go, get a hot meal and re-watch Worlds or irrelevant NCAA races from 2003. I really don't want to get heavily involved in another sport so I've been coping with enormous handfuls of chocolate chips and large blocks of cheese. Desperate times require desperate measures.

This year we were especially spoiled because we had Worlds and then immediately Nationals. We couldn't even keep up with all the blogs and tweets. My tivo was loaded. Every night it was like Santa came by and dumped a load of presents under my tree. (If my children are reading this yes, Santa is real and this is not merely an analogy.) It was a glorious few weeks but that just made the comedown even harder. Not only did Santa stop coming but so did the Easter Bunny, Hanukah Harry and the tooth fairy.

For the past few weeks the swim fan has endured almost nothing but vacation tweets and silence from their favorite elite level swimmers. But....listen....(ahhhhhhhh.....) there has been a recent rash of tweets from swimmers about being sore and tired. Ricky Berens tweeted yesterday he had his first double of the Olympic season but it's still early. Tyler Clary doesn't even know what time practice is, he showed up an hour early or something. There's been a lot of activity at the NCAA level (like no one wants to be in the Big 12 anymore) but, overall, it's been quiet.

This year I have taken some initiative. I have decided that being a swim fan means supporting the sport at all levels. A couple of weeks ago I took my daughters to our local high school's swim team "open house." It was awesome and the kids really appreciated it. You could tell they weren't used to a lot of attention. I'm also taking the girls to some meets at Mizzou if there's anyone to swim against (ha ha) and to some sectional meets. Going to see the high school swim team really showed me elite-level swimming is only a piece of swimming and there's much more out there to enjoy. I had a great time at the high school, saw some good swimming and got a great recommendation for an orthodontist....you think you're gonna get that at Ultra Swim?

So hold on swim fans we can do this. Don't call Dr. Drew just yet. Check out the swimming in your area; the college, high school or even club. Get around some chlorine, I guarantee your serotonin levels will rise. In the meantime, how are you coping? I'm getting tired of cheese.

Scared of Realignment

2011-09-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

Gratuitous headline photo loosely tied to Texas A&M

Is college swimming staring down it's Ragnarok?

While the college football world is completely abuzz with rumors that Texas A&M, in the Swimming World we only have one article from TSC to put the swimming information in perspective. Last week, as Georgia Tech coaches gathered for our all staff meeting, our Athletic Director made a passing reference to realignment while stating that we are committed to the ACC. And then it was done.

I wish I had some extra special information to put in this blog, but the truth is that I am as scared and bewildered as everybody. When I read in a college swimming thread that Georgia Tech was supposedly one of the teams they could use to form the SEC super conference, at first I laughed. Then I thought "could it be true?".

On the one hand, maybe nothing bad will happen at all. Maybe its just a reorganization of chairs that happens from time to time with conferences. But its hard to feel completely safe when the decisions are being made primarily on the basis of football (and maybe basketball, a little).

The last time around, there were certainly some positives that came out of realignment. To speak specifically to the ACC, Virginia Tech makes way more sense geographically and educationally in the ACC. Their swim team has flourished since switching conferences. Boston College, on the other hand, didn't even send their best male swimmers to the ACC championships last year, a curious decision given their membership.

So I'm hoping its all good news, that Texas A&M makes the SEC that much faster, that Texas and Mizzou men find a conference meet to go to and that Kansas, and Iowa State don't get left out in the cold. I'm hoping that this decision doesn't ricochet off in so many other directions and put programs at risk. To think that's exactly what is going to happen given the atmosphere in college swimming, however, is almost completely naive.

It Finally Boiled Over

2011-09-04T15:53:00.000-07:00

The Viking is gonna be typing a little slower than usual for a while...

I have hardly blogged all summer. I have just been too busy. Renovations, teaching, high school swim, summer league, USA coaching, swim lessons... in a small town the swim program can often seem like a one horse show. I have tried a few times to write about it all, but have abandoned the post every time. The frustrations I have are aimed in too many directions, and none of it is really anyone's fault. It just all adds up to being more than one person can handle.

I put in at least four weeks of over 100 hours on the clock this summer. Physically, that isn't so bad. For a large chunk of my life that has been the norm. That is the coaching life. I chose this over commercial fishing. At age 15, the first job I ever had took me away from home for a week where I worked shifts as long as 41 hours, and I was sea sick for most of it. I can handle the grind, but now that I have two little girls at home I struggle with missing them. I cried when I missed their first jumps from the diving board because I had a Sunday night meeting. I can deal with being tired and watching my body slowly fall apart, but this is new.

My classes started today. My renovations aren't done. I am not ready at all. Not ready for class. Not ready for high school swim season. We are hosting a meet this Thursday and I can't find our stopwatches and back-up buttons. I can't secure an official. We still have no seating of any kind and we have about 90 lockers on the deck that were supposed to be installed over a week ago. The new filtration and chemical systems aren't adjusted and automated yet. I don't have time to do the things needed to get the pool ready. We are using it and can actually swim, but when kids are in the water, my hands are tied regarding getting anything else done. What in the hell kind of a job can you work from 5:30am to 8:30pm six or seven days a week and still have work to do when you get home? No one would ever guess a swim coach could claim that. The other teachers laugh and give me a funny look when I talk about how stressed I get. Especially in the summer.

Tonight is also the first practice for the club. Since we could not find a coach, I am back in the game. I love doing it. The club is my baby, but it is a huge sacrifice for family and my stress level. I am not handling it well and the season hasn't even started yet. I had my main assistant back out on me, which means that since I have so many conflicting high school meets the club won't have any coach at all on deck for about half of the meets on the schedule. Another part of the stress is simply that I am in a state where high school coaches can't coach their high school swimmers outside of the season, which means that when I have to coach the USA program, my school gets screwed. I am making all of the other schools better and am forced to exclude my swimmers from the elite groups. They are swimming (if I find an assistant,) but they must swim with the novice groups because they cannot be directly coached by me. There is no way around it. Once again, small town kids get screwed. The cities have multiple clubs to swim at; the small towns don't. My club serves multiple small towns and with it being so hard to find coaches, it puts my swimmers at a disadvantage. I heard once that coaches in Michigan won a lawsuit to force their state to drop those restrictions, but I don't have the time or money to pursue that. I would if I could. Every year we search for coaches, and there just aren't any. The rules are supposed to be about making things equal. Right now they are keeping my athletes from getting the same opportunity as everybody else.

Either way, it doesn't matter. The only other option would be to shut down the club. I am not okay with that. It would doom me to never having a chance to have success for the remainder of my career, and more importantly swimming in our area would go back to the dark ages where swim moms didn't understand why their swimmer who wins all the time in the summer league isn't being offered full rides and Olympic team spots. Before my club got here, no one knew about the great big world of swimming out there. The kids who live here deserve the chance to truly pursue excellence. That is why I built it and I was fully aware of the high school restrictions when I did.

The problem is, I am starting to crack. This life-consuming job is fundamentally changing who I am. I have developed anger issues. Today I got angry about the stupid pool vacuum. I punched the wall. I have three fractures in my wrist. I am an idiot. I haven't always been an idiot. I promise.

My wife told me "please don't punch anything else today."

My response: "You don't have to worry, baby. I look like a dork when I throw a punch with my left hand. I don't want to look that stupid."

I have already started telling the kids I got attacked by ninjas. I don't think they're buying it.

Nighttime Snack: The Athlete Coach Relationship

2011-08-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

I seem to be the new go-to for stupid swim related *&%# on the internet. Yay! Keep it coming, people!

****WARNING*******Use of the "F" word at the end of the clip.******WARNING*******

Why Season Planning is For Dopes

2011-08-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

Hopefully by now you've realized that the title's of my posts are far more inflammatory then what's inside. I'm going to argue in this space against what seems to be a universally accepted part of coaching swimming: the season plan. I was reminded to write this yesterday as I listened to the president of Georgia Tech discuss his 25 year plan for the University. He asked us to look into the past 25 years, and in doing so inadvertently pointed out the folly in such long term planning. The future is just too unpredictable.

After all, 25 years ago, personal computers were just barely catching on. They were bulky, impractical and far more expensive then they were today. I'm sure that there were individuals who at the time predicted certain ways in which the world would change to be what it is now. Retroactively they are hailed as visionaries and genius. But the truth of the matter is that the world is highly unpredictable. None of us know what is going to happen and we should accept it to a certain degree.

Take recent swimming history. Who could have predicted that in 2008 suit technology would appear that was far better than its predecessors, that the world record in the men's 100 free would drop almost a full second in one year, and then in a flash they would be gone again, all while Craig Lord broke his keyboard complaining about it. Ok that last part was eminently predictable, but the rest?

The problem with planning is that as soon as you have built your beautiful sand castle, the world can easily conjure up a tidal wave and smashes it to pieces. Nothing ever goes to plan! Having a plan can make you extremely slow to react to change and inflexible. Or maybe you are flexible and deviate from your plan often- what was the point of all that work you put into the plan again? Let me go through a couple of common objections I here when I say I don't believe in season planning:

1. "I don't work that way, I need to have something organized before the season/practice or it will drive me crazy"

This is probably the most frequent objection. It's frequent because so many people have been raised within the swimming system, which is typically heavily structured and organized. In contrast, they have not been trained to work with no prior organization. Imagine a person with a left arm twice the size of their right. They're going to want to do all the heavy lifting with their left arm. Thinking on your feet and reacting rather than sticking to a plan requires purposeful training. It drives me crazy to have something planned because everything that follows deviates so strongly from what the plan was made for that I can literally watch my plan's effectiveness deteriorate

2. "Swimmers need a plan to be successful and know where they're going"

Again, some of the same arguments as above apply. But also think about what you are preparing for. How many coaches reading this have coached swimmers that are great in practice and not so great at meets? Swimmers get labeled as "head cases" often in this circumstance. I disagree. Most often I see a swimmer who has mastered operating within structure while being unprepared for random chance. Think of the weak right arm analogy again. Practice is far more predictable than a meet. Swimmers can learn to control practice. However, the tighter you try and control a race in a meet, the more it slips through your fingers. So again, I would argue that swimmers' training needs to prepare them for the dynamic environment they will encounter in meets. Their training needs to strengthen their ability to remain composed in an uncontrolled environment, rather than preparing them for a controlled one that doesn't exist.

3. "Aren't you just lazy?"

I've heard this often when I come to practice with absolutely nothing written down or prepared for the workout. The truth is, coaching a workout without a plan is the opposite of lazy. It demands a tremendous amount of attention. Since I during one set I don't have the next layed out, I have to be very attentive to what is happening in the water and know instinctively what to do next, repeatedly. The results aren't perfect of course, but no method is, and only by doing do I feel like I can better for the next time.

If you've read all the way through, are a planner, and still don't want to kill me, I'm glad. If you want some advice on where to start, I might suggest leaving little pieces of what you do unplanned and build from there. Just enough to get that right arm sore a little, but not so much that you can't move it for a few days.

Nighttime Snack: Hurricane Irene Edition

2011-08-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

The Hair! The Satin! The Rippin' Guitar Solos!

Since no one else is posting anything I'm taking matters into my own hands and doing whatever I want. (Actually, Gus knows about this.) So this is for everyone on the east coast staring down the eye of Hurricane Irene. Here's your soundtrack. Stay safe!

Magic in Water

2011-08-25T05:18:00.000-07:00

I'm dreading the end of the outdoor pool season. Indoor pool season just isn't the same. Where I live indoor pool season means it's gray, cold and dreary outside. Everything dies; leaves on trees, grass, flowers, and especially my happiness. My happiness is inextricably tied to my daughter's happiness. That happens when you become a parent. The fact that I have 3 daughters and they're all 8 years old and one is on the autism spectrum means someone (at any given point) is not happy. Therefore my happiness quotient is usually leveled as well. But something happens in the summer...something magic.....especially for my daughter, Kate. You see, there is no "cure" for autism. But in my house, for Kate especially, there is a magic in water.

Autism is a developmental disorder that affects a person's ability to communicate and be social. Most people with autism have issues with their sensory system; things are often too loud, too crowded and generally "too much" to handle. They may not know exactly where their body is in space which is disorienting. There's a "spectrum" so some people with autism are "high functioning," they may seem unusual or quirky. Some people are "low functioning" so they may not speak at all and have distruptive behaviors. Kate is somewhere in the middle, I guess. She speaks but she's not really conversational. Simple back and forth is about it. She's learning to play with others and she's giving us much more eye contact. Things are improving but like the saying goes, it's a marathon not a sprint.

During the summer, in the sunshine, in the reflection of a clear blue pool, Kate comes alive. She lives at the pool, she cannot get enough. It's incredible to see the transformation. It very much is like a caterpillar emerging from it's cocoon and blossoming into a butterfly. In the water Kate is much more talkative. She uses more words to form sentences and she describes things in much more detail. She looks right at us and she's also extremely playful. Instead of keeping to herself she commands our attention; ring around the rosie, jumping into our arms, dunking games and singing songs together....it goes on for hours. She's connected to us, she's with us, she is a part of us.

Kate has also learned to swim this summer. Missy Franklin she's not but she's able to be safe in all depths of water and she can easily swim to the side of the pool. Her favorite thing to do is float...the poor lifeguards...she floats facing downward and can hold her breath for a really long period of time. It looks scary if you don't know what she's doing. She can do that forever. She taught herself a breaststroke kick this summer. I don't know how-she must have seen her sisters do it since they were working on it all summer. Drowning is the number one cause of accidents/death for children with autism so her safety was paramount. I don't care if she doesn't know who George Washington is...the kid's gonna swim.

There's something about the warm sun on her face and the water. As fall approaches I'll take her to the indoor pool and even have her splash around in the tub (which has always been calming for her) but it's not the same. Over the next few years we're looking at moving somewhere warm again. As beautiful as it is to watch her emerge during the spring and summer it's heart breaking to watch her fade away in the fall and winter. We get used to "having her around" not just in body but in spirit. It's the greatest gift. I treasure every moment. I take hundreds of pictures and probably hours of video of her "alive," happy, connected, laughing, looking right at us, asking us to play, giggling with glee and precious moments. Because there's magic in water.

Nighttime Snack: Man Steals Swimming Pool

2011-08-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

Yup, that's where the fun used to be

Some guy in Massachusetts stole a family's 24 ft diameter/52 inch deep above-ground swimming pool and sold it for scrap metal. It took him 3.5 hours to disassemble it while the family was at work.

Steal a kid's pool? Why don't you just run over their puppy? That's just mean. My kids would need years and years of therapy to recover from this. They caught the guy; charged him with trespassing, larceny and being a grade A schmuck.

Craig Lord: Never Afraid to be Ignorant or Closeminded

2011-08-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've commented on the articles of the foremost (outside of our own Tom Duke) swimming writer in jolly old England, Craig Lord. Yesterday, he posted something that I just couldn't ignore. It's one of the articles that reminds you that Lord's primary sources of information are an ever aging and conservative cadre of coaches and officials. He is the official mouthpiece of their grumbling. Yesterday's complaint? There are too many high level meets. Let's address his points:

How do I know who Lord's sources are? Let's look at some of the reasons and try and guess where they came from:

"many who serve on committees and commissions cannot be at the meetings where they are supposed to dispense advice to FINA"

"makes stars of 16-year-olds"

"runs in the face of what many leading programmes work towards when it comes to success on the very biggest of occasions, with leading coaches from USA to Hungary and Australia, China and many others sticking to the truth of the matter: one big moment a season suffices"

"It is a model that will not bring extra attention to swimming through more broadcast and print media outlets and coverage because no-one beyond the swimming world cares about a meet that does not feature the equivalent of Phelps Vs Lochte"

Some of the quotes are more obvious than others. The farther I have gotten in coaching the more I have realized that it is in the interest of those at the very top to centralize as much as possible. Why? Because it benefits them. If you are the coach of a World Champion swimmer, of course you don't want any of these distracting other meets in the way of your big meet.

So here is my argument against all of the above. I think that the wide swath of high level meets is great for a number of reasons. I think it serves as significant steps along the developmental ladder along the way to the true "big" meets that Lord mentions, Worlds and the Olympics. The leap from, say, Danish Nationals to World Championships is a huge one, made significantly more gradual by the presence of Nordic Juniors, European Juniors, European Short Course, the Mare Nostrum series, and more. I am arguing in much the same way Cliff Murray made an argument against the huge gap between US Sectional Champs and Junior Nationals. We can't have these chasms between levels of competitiveness, especially with the increasing frequency of professional, veteran swimmers.

Having a lot of "fast" meets also allows more new coaches to come into the fold. If the bar for prominence in coaching is set at getting a swimmer to the Olympics or World Championships, you're going to see considerably less change in the coaching ranks. The coaches of swimmers that have in the past coached someone to the Olympics will always have a higher likelihood to coach future Olympic talent.

Lastly, I think that these meets are the foundation for year round excitement about swimming. Lord is right that currently there is little excitement for a non World or Olympic meet. The problem comes primarily in promotion. This is really starting a whole entire other blog, but the promotion of swimming by FINA and many national governing bodies is poor at best. In fact, I'll save that for later. Until then...

Afternoon Coffee with an Illustrious Member of The Faroese Delegation

2011-08-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

Two Vikings Meet on the Field of Battle

If you've been following my blog, you know that my obsession with the Faroe Islands is reaching borderline insane proportions. So when my (online) friend Rókur Í Jákupsstovu told me that he would be in the vicinity at the same time as my Danish vacation, needless to say I didn't hesitate. For those of you who don't know, Rókur is the author of by far the best swim blog in the Faroes, www.svimjing.com. He also travelled to Shanghai with Pal, his coach Jon Bjarnason and the President of Faroese swimming, Jon Hestoy. Over a beer, and the subsequent coffee we drank to stay awake that you see in the picture above, we talked about anything and everything in the swimming world.

It's going to be a very interesting year for Pal and the Faroes in general. They are in uncharted waters, having only in the last year or so finalized the plans for a Faroese swimmer to compete on the Danish Olympic team. Reading between the lines of the Danish newspapers, there is undoubtedly some serious tension about what I always catch myself looking at as a feel good story. The executive of the Danish swimming federation was quoted saying "we will allow Pal to continue training in the Faroes" among other things, an odious quote.

There are political and historical issues weighing on the entire process. I admit that prior to this summer I knew very little of the history of the Faroes, particularly in relation to Denmark. A disastrous economic crisis from the 90s is still fresh in many Faroese minds. Depending on who you ask the Danish government either "saved" the Faroes or its meddling almost led the the collapse of the entire island economy.

My takeaway from a summer of research and reading the papers is that the Danish federation certainly knows that the Faroes need them. What they don't realize is that they sorely need the Faroes. As great a summer as it was for Danish swimming, all the good results are on the women's side right now. With some promising juniors still a few years away, Pal is the only legitimate medal threat on the Danish men's team for 2012.

I have an easy way to resolve this- simply place me in charge of Danish swimming! I mean, it's not as far fetched as the Viking taking over USA Swimming, right? I mean you could at least think about it...

Nighttime Snack: Werk it at your next practice, ladies!

2011-08-21T17:58:00.000-07:00

But do They Come in Black?

No longer do you have to choose between fashion and athleticism! Bored with the same ol' flip flops? Some designer in Sweden or somewhere with too much time on their hands has solved the problem. I have no idea where you buy these but the first person to buy them, take a picture and send it to us gets an autographed photo of the Swim Viking in his Speedo. So hurry!

Yet Another Unreasonable Firing! Sue Everyone!

2011-08-19T17:52:00.000-07:00

Maybe he has a chance as a beach lifeguard. Or a contractor.

It's ridiculous! Somebody call the lawyers! Burger King didn't just fire their King... according to Yahoo! News they decapitated him!

In my opinion the King was the only thing they had going for them. This makes no sense. What is wrong with people in this country!? Our beloved King probably did something small like refuse to wear a speedo to work or had on a t-shirt with the wrong mascot. The CEO of Burger King probably went to Oklahoma State. This sucks!

And to make it worse, in the comments of the Yahoo! article there are people making unsubstantiated accusations, calling him a child molester and accusing him of being caught eating at McDonalds as though he is some kind of burger traitor. How dare they! I hope the Burger Queen takes them for everything they have-- every damn one of those dirty SOB's!

Long Live the King!

.

No Morning Workouts

2011-08-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

What if my alarm clock is stuck?

So I realize I posted yesterday and promised grand blogs to come. This is not one of the blogs I promised. Instead, I am posting right off the top of my head in a stream of consciousness like I usually do. My thoughts are consumed with the coming season. The campus is flush with incoming freshmen. I'm trying something different this year, not without trepidation. Depending on how you look at it, I'm either catching the wave of the future, already way behind or destroying our future. I'll let you decide

This year I am ditching double workouts. No morning practice. Throughout my entire coaching career I have been locked into the same schedule (even back to my own swimming days. This will be the first year in ten that I do not have morning practice at 6 am sharp on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I've ditched them entirely.

I've made adjustments that I think will mean more work and not less. I've lengthened all my afternoon workouts from 2 hours to 2.5. Saturday practices may be longer as well. Without replicating warmup and warmdown twice a day, I think I actually gain time to do work. Most of my afternoon practices were bursting at the seems of the 2 hour mark last year, mostly because I became maniacal about warmdown, often forcing swimmers into warmdown sets that were 15-20 minutes in duration. Now I'll have some breathing room in the afternoon.

Psychologically, I think it may also benefit the swimmers to come once a day. Everybody knows the wear that a swim season puts on swimmers psyches. While you may have the perspective that morning practice is all about becoming "mentally tough", there is no benefit if that isn't the actual result.

Physiologically, I am looking at a group of athletes somewhere between a traditional "middle distance" group and a "sprint". These are not high recovery swimmers, and I found often that I couldn't to get them to do my high intensity sets twice in one day. I am hoping that the schedule allows them to maximize their recovery a bit more so that I can in actuality make each practice harder.

I didn't pull this idea from thin air. I have known that Sean Hutchison was a notable coach who wasn't running doubles. But I would give primary credit in leading me to this conclusion to Joel Shinofield, head coach of Washington and Lee. Besides being boyishly handsome, Joel is also a mentor of mine and an extremely successful swim coach. I ended up stalking him down because I was really impressed for his propensity for taking mediocre high school sprinters and making them really fast. In my conversations, he presented pretty compelling evidence for once a day only, some of which I have put forth above.

Rationally, I have no doubts about the strategy. In my heart, I still have a part of me that just feels wrong not running morning workout. Maybe I'll just wake up anyway, drink some coffee and walk around the pool deck a bit. At least for the first couple weeks.

Another Lawsuit-- This Guy was Fired Over a Swim Brief!

2011-08-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

If Roy Lester worked for this website he would be fired. Even Lisa has to wear a brief on the job with us.

I know people are scared to wear the brief. You have to be pretty comfortable with your manhood. I get it. I swam with my high school kids during practice yesterday at a rival team pool (because we are still in renovations) and I wore my brief; big old belly hanging over it and all. Awkward. Intimidating. Creepy. Whatever. I am being true to myself.

The cool part about yesterday is that the son of one of our high school principals is trying swim team for the first time this year, and I got to send an email to his mom that said "You had no idea how good I am at this coaching thing. I got him wearing a speedo in less than two weeks." He didn't try out last year because he didn't want to wear one and all he had worn so far this year was board shorts. Ha!

I love the brief, and as you can probably tell by the comments on the "Rivalry Gone Too Far" post that I don't like to see people fired from a job over unreasonable circumstances. The OU t-shirt thing set me off... so you can imagine how conflicted I was over this link on Adolph Kiefer's facebook page, with the story of a 61 year-old beach lifeguard who was fired after 40 years for refusing to wear a brief on the job!

From an article in the NY Daily News:

Lester sued the state, claiming age discrimination, arguing the Speedo is for the washboard stomach set, not aging dads like him.
"I wore a Speedo when I was in my 20s," Lester said. "But come on. There should be a law prohibiting anyone over the age of 50 from wearing a Speedo."
Lester believes the Speedo edict was an attempt to rid Jones Beach of its aging lifeguards. The former lifeguard union head estimates that more than 80% of Jones Beach lifeguards are older than 40.
"This was not right," said Lester, a bankruptcy lawyer who is representing himself in the age discrimination claim. "They were just trying to get rid of the older guys. To me the whole key to being a good lifeguard is experience. An older guy sees a save before anyone else. You know the water."

On the one hand I am thinking "I don't care how old or out of shape I am I can wear a damn brief if I want to." On the other hand I am thinking, "Stick it to the man, Roy! They fired you on unreasonable grounds! Don't give up the fight!"

Adolph Kiefer seems to feel the same way as on facebook he posted "Cut the guy a break!" and "But I think it's okay to still wear the brief past 50. And I do!" Of course you do Adolph. Because you are awesome.

According to the poll on the article, it seems like 88% think Roy Lester shouldn't be forced to wear the speedo on the job if it doesn't interfere with his performance. Apparently, the guards have to test out by swimming 100 yards under 1:15 and Lester said he could do it in Dungarees. The article points out that he is an accomplished triathlete. Judging from the picture, I am pretty sure I would hire him even if he wanted to wear a bikini. The kids at our pool just behave better when at least one of the lifeguards is older than them and could beat them in a race.

I am anxious to see how this one pans out.

.

I Missed You Too!

2011-08-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

Little known fact: Denmark has BEAUTIFUL palm trees

Hey everybody, I'm back! I know that all of you have been worried sick these past couple weeks, with me not posting and all. You probably thought I had a mental breakdown after blogging 359 times a day during Worlds and then from the pool deck at Nationals. I'm here to tell you that everything is fine. I just went on vacation, ok, so you can stop worrying. (Scanning posts and comments). Wait, no one noticed? Seriously?

Well in any case, even though nobody missed me, I definitely missed you. Even on my vacation I had a few pots brewing for the Swim Brief, so in the next few days you can expect my blogging to resume at a steady clip. I had a chance to meet an honorable member of the Faroese swimming delegation while I was abroad. I will also be taking a few chances to put Shanghai and the summer in context with the Olympics just one year away. I will also be silently planning revenge on the people who didn't show the proper respect while I was gone.

By the way, have you heard about this Sun Yang guy? He is really good!

Rivalry Gone Too Far

2011-08-17T06:04:00.000-07:00

It's all in fun until someone gets sued.

Missouri State and Drury have a traditionally strong swimming rivalry between them in Springfield, MO. The thing that is great about it is that after all the trash talk and incidents, at the end of the day the kids are all still friends. I am not going to say that there has never been bad blood between the coaches or the kids-- there is a great history there. Drury's Brian Reynolds actually swam for Missouri State's Jack Steck back when Jack was leading the Panthers to some of their first national championships. As a matter of fact, there was a twenty year gap where the two schools were not allowed to dual each other because the administration worried it would just be too much for Springfield to handle. It was pretty heated between the two programs.

Still, after all of that, the two teams have been able to set it all aside and get together for some pretty intense match-ups that are great for all involved. And the best part is that when the meet is over, the swimmers from both teams get together and have a great time, just as they do throughout the year. I can't say the same for some of the big sports rivalries like MU/KU or North Carolina/Duke, but fans of several rival teams have fun-spirited banter and that makes for great conversation between sports junkies. Graduates from the two local colleges here among our teaching staff constantly rib each other about wearing the wrong colors. That is a part of what makes sports worth following.

Sports rivalries are meant to be fun. Not ugly. Not bitter. And they should definitely not require lawyers getting involved... unless of course you are into football and you live in Oklahoma. Then it gets ridiculous.

Oklahoma State Football Coach Mike Gundy is being sued because he fired a contractor from a $30,000 job simply for wearing an OU baseball shirt while on the job.

For reals. From USA Today:

According to the lawsuit, Gundy arrived at the house at 9:30 a.m. and spotted Loveland's shirt. "How dare you come into my house and offend my wife," Gundy allegedly said.

Gundy then allegedly used profanity as he told the contractor to get off his property. He called Loveland a "stupid idiot" for wearing the shirt on "OSU soil," and refused Loveland's apologies. The contractor offered to turn his shirt inside-out, but was refused, according to the lawsuit.

Besides just the absurdity of the whole situation, I have to ask some real questions:

How in the hell are they gonna find a jury in Oklahoma who isn't a fan of one team or the other? And if they ain't a sports fan, aren't they gonna be biased against the sports coach? If you are not a sports fan, this is an even more ridiculous situation! This is going to be dismissed and it will be a real shame. This coach should not be able to get away with treating anyone this way. The sad part of it is that I can only imagine he is being hailed as a hero in Stillwater for his Cowboy loyalty.

This makes me want to laugh and throw up at the same time. Relax, people. Please just chill.

.

Nighttime Snack: A Big Bag of Gus

2011-08-16T18:48:00.000-07:00

Mike Gustafson! Healthy Yet Satisfying!

Texas A&M moving to the SEC? What does that mean for college swimming? According to Gus, it should be a rallying cry for swim fans throughout the country. Read his article for USA Swimming here:

http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=0&itemid=3629&mid=8712

A Tribute to a Beloved Coach and Within it; A Message

2011-08-16T05:14:00.000-07:00

Joy of Competition

Meaning of Effort

Worth of Character

Power of Kindness

Wisdom of Honesty

Influence by Example

Rewards of Cooperation

Virtues of Patience

It seems that Coach Greg House possessed all the qualities of a "good coach." The Swim and Dive coach at Blue Valley North High School in Kansas City was one of the winningest high school coaches (in terms of state titles) in Kansas history- leading his team to 20 state swim and dive championships during his 30 year career. When Coach House died last week of lung cancer not only did he leave behind a lot of trophies locked up in glass cabinets he also left behind something much more important; the hundreds of lives he impacted. A friend of mine sent me a link to a blog from one of his former swimmers. She swam for Coach House years ago but the news of his death moved her greatly. She channeled her grief into her art and she was gracious enough to let me repost some of her illustrations here. I think they convey a tremendous love for her sport and for her coach.

Two coaches write for this blog and many coaches read this blog. Just because you played a sport doesn't make you a good coach. If that was the case all actors would make great directors and all students would make great teachers. According to John Wooden, "a coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment." Coaches are bound by an inordinate amount of rules, regulations and red tape. You have to deal with kids and all of their idiosyncrasies, their obnoxious parents who wonder why their kid hasn't made an Olympic Trial cut in 3rd grade, an anemic paycheck and we've even got a swim coach without a pool. It's not easy, even Bob Bowman gets frustrated sometimes.

I think what I'm trying to say and what Elizabeth Baddeley is trying to say with her illustrations is: You matter. Coach Greg House mattered and you, the coach reading this, matters. Elizabeth is selling these prints on her Etsy store http://www.etsy.com/shop/MisplacedMeadowlark and she is donating 100% of the profit to cancer research in her coach's honor.

Let's Talk About Jewelry!

2011-08-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

If he stops to take off his jewelry they are just gonna DQ him for 'delay of meet' anyway.

I have never understood why the high school swimming rule-makers have such an obsession with jewelry. Kids can't wear any, even if it is just a hair band that a girl put on her wrist and forgot to take it off. Every Olympic year my swimmers come to me and say "Hey! Every girl they interviewed in the Olympics was wearing earrings!? What gives?"

Of course, I just shrug my shoulders. I don't have an answer. I write it off as one of those rules that makes sense for some activities so they just make it a rule for all sports with no consideration for each sport individually. There isn't really an injury risk or a competitive advantage, right? It is just nit-picking for the sake of nit-picking, and in my opinion it is ridiculous to disqualify an athlete over an earring or a wristband. Nobody wants to lose that way and nobody wants to win that way either. What bothers me is that jewelry becomes the dominating conversation at most of our coaches meetings before the season and at meets. Now whenever I host a meet I actually put in the meet info something like this: "There will be a brief and awkward coaches meeting at 12:45 so we can talk ad nauseum about jewelry!"

Even on the year cheatajima forced us to add the dolphin kick to the breaststroke pull-out and there was so much confusion about where the dolphin kick was allowed to be placed, we still spent the majority of our meeting talking about jewelry and virtually ignored the important stuff in comparison. The best part of that was that the guy who ran our meeting had the pull-out rule all wrong and we argued about it all season because officials in my area were making bad calls. Seriously... it was absolutely ridiculous.

Last year, I thought we were starting to get it right. The rule was that if the officials saw a kid wearing jewelry they gave them a warning. If the kid ignored it, they got deeq'ed. I could live with that. So, naturally I was ticked this week when I got the email below:

MISSOURI STATE ADOPTION OF

JEWELRY RULE 3-3-5 FOR SWIMMING/DIVING

· By the approval of the MSHSAA Board of Directors, Missouri will put into place a more restrictive rule than the NFHS. This adoption was made for the sport of track and field for the 2010-11 school year, and it is being expanded to include swimming and diving for 2011-12.

· Each swimming/diving meet should start with a coaches meeting prior to the start of the meet to handle scratches/adds and other meet information. The meet Director may run this meeting; however, the Referee/Starter will attend to administer a Jewelry Warning to the entire field. From this point forward, any violation of the Jewelry Rule will be a disqualification of the athlete from the event in which the violation occurred.

· At meets where a coaches meeting is not possible, a request for an alternative method for issuing the Warning may be requested from the MSHSAA Office.

· At the State Championships, the Warning will be attached to the Team Packet which must be picked up by each HEAD COACH. A Warning will also be given during the FIRST CALL to every event; for example, “First Call 50yd Freestyle: The uniform and jewelry rule are in effect.”

· The ultimate responsibility for having each competitor compliant with the uniform and the jewelry rule lies with the COACH.

· This adoption also appears in the 2011-12 Swimming and Diving Manual, which can be accessed from the MSHSAA website, and as a stand-alone article in the swimming area of the website.

Come on, guys! Really? We all know that kids are gonna forget to take it off. Do we really need to take it that far? Is jewelry ever going to not be the last thing on my mind to talk about with kids before their races?

Ugh. How frustrating. Just let the kids wear their dang jewelry.

Emmert's NCAA Retreat Wrap-up

2011-08-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

Mark Emmert, about to scrape the charred remains of the Husky swimming program from the bottom of his frying pan in 2009.

So, Mark Emmert wrapped up his NCAA retreat and is being applauded for actually making a decision without doing the standard NCAA "let's form a committee and a task force and come talk about this again in five years." Well, from the sound of it, they talked about a lot of stuff and ended up moving on just one decision. They plan to hold some teams out of post-season play if they don't meet grade standards, which I guess would have taken some heavy hitters out of the basketball tournament this year according to the scores that will now be required... but of course those schools will find a way to pay for whatever necessary tutors and bribes they need to be in compliance. That's how it works. Apparently they have to have a record of half of their students on track to graduate. That shouldn't be too hard to get around, right?

Big whoop.

If you read this article at SI.com you can see some of the other things they talked about and plan to address in the near future. Of course, there wasn't really anything about non-revenue sports being cut. Gee, I wonder why that didn't come up? Wasn't there recently some kind of a cooperative agreement between the USOC and the NCAA to address that? I tried to google it but apparently it is not big enough news to even come up on a web search. Go figure.

The best part of the Sports Illustrated write up was this: When they talked about allowing athletes to be paid additional money to cover the "true costs of college" it was actually brought up that only the big conferences could afford it and that would give them a competitive advantage. Wow. They acknowledged one of the many legitimate problems with it... but of course it was all shrugged off when "the presidents seemed to be lock-step with the commissioners in believing said imbalance already exists."

So, why is it a problem if we make it worse? Just a drop in the bucket, right?

.

Jump in for Joplin!

2011-08-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

Because swimmers are the coolest people on Earth.

After the May 22nd tornado hit Joplin, there was an outpouring of support from swim teams from all over the nation hoping to help swim families get on their feet. Joplin was crawling with volunteers from all over the country and it is amazing how much has been done in the months since the storm. We all knew though, that after the initial surge of volunteers came and went, there would still be many families with needs that would not have been met for various reasons.

One of the emails I got that offered help went a little above and beyond what I had seen. A coach in Wisconsin who I had become friends with over email, Vicki Terlap, sent me a message saying that she was organizing a fundraising event called Jump in for Joplin. How cool is that? She got a few swim teams together and made a truly inspiring event of it. They raised $1159.00 and it looks like they had a lot of fun doing it! They had all sorts of games and races and it looks like they made it the best kind of party-- the kind that helps a group of total strangers who are friends through swimming.

I sent them a list of swim families who had major expenses and needs that were not covered by insurance. Some were ER bills, some were expenses accrued from trying to salvage their homes, some had to do with the loss of vehicles that did not have appropriate coverage. They were all swim families who have lost a lot, including the lives of loved ones. Their act of kindness will go a long way to help those who are still in need months after their lives were changed after the terrible storm. Thank you to everyone involved in the Jump in for Joplin event. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I hope we can get together at a meet some day and have some fun. You are amazing and we are eternally grateful!

Morning Bowl of Gustafson

2011-08-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

I think last time we had a Morning Bowl of Gustafson the US Stock Market and the global economy did pretty well. Maybe it was coincidence....maybe it wasn't. Therefore, I'm posting a link to his latest masterpiece he wrote for USA Swimming. Not only is it an interesting article about Brendan Hansen's comeback, my 401K may recover. No pressure, Gus.

http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=0&itemid=3594&mid=8712

The End is Nigh: Emmert's NCAA Retreat

2011-08-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

The NCAA booted this guy out of their meeting for speaking up on behalf of non-revenue sports. Then they made a rule stating that new pools built at universities must now have a lazy river for football players to play in instead of lap lanes.

The Viking's summarization of day one of Mark Emmert's NCAA Reform Retreat and all of the self-contradictions therein:

Yes, we at the NCAA don't ever want to leave amateur athletics and move to pay-for-play spending; we are certainly concerned about outrageous coaching salaries and the disparity between Division 1 schools with $5 million dollar budgets compared to those with $145 million dollars to spend and the competitive advantages it affords them; and we know that most schools are already losing money trying to keep up with athletic spending of their competitors...

but we really feel that the solution is to expand scholarships to provide money up to the full cost of attendance. You know, the money it really costs to go to school beyond tuition, fees, room, board and books. This has the support of all of the schools in the big conferences who can afford it, and after we make this move all of the rest of the schools and their non-revenue sports will dry up and die and then we won't have to listen to their whining anymore. This really will solve all of our problems and the challenge is to make sure this happens "quickly and thoughtfully."

At least, that is my take on it. You can come up with your own take by reading about it in the following articles.

NCAA Calls for New Scholarship Rules at Retreat- AP

Emmert's Retreat Can't Fix NCAA's Tough Issues

To be honest, Ralph Nader's Sports Manifesto is sounding less and less crazy every day.

.

Olympic Numbers Game

2011-08-09T07:53:00.000-07:00

Since I caught a bunch of grief for not sharing some of my "other" "swim" "writing" here's an article I wrote yesterday for USA Swimming. My numbers might be off, and perhaps the rest of you can come up with some better/funnier/edgier/sexier numbers (like the sheer number of condoms used at each Olympics), but here are some pretty fun facts I discovered during my morning research (performed while sipping coffee and listening to my 25 lb. cat wail and moan for more food, the fat piece of fat):

.00014%: Percent chance you’ll qualify for the Olympics if you are a USA Swimming swimmer.

9,600: Miles (estimate) that the average competitive swimmer swims between Olympics every four years.

360: Days until the rematch between Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps in the 200IM in London. (Of course they have to qualify first.)

360: Days until I throw up from sheer excitement.

Read the rest of the article here, and so but now finally heretofore and thus, Desantis, stop hassling me!

Nighttime Snack: One Year Out, Just Not What We Expected

2011-08-08T19:05:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, this is not the Olympic Torch

My official "Olympic Glow" has taken a bit of a tarnishing lately. For the 3rd night in a row there have been riots in the streets of London, starting in Tottenham in the north of the city, now moving throughout London and even to other cities like Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester.

Not **exactly** great PR for London as it looks to host the Olympics 353 days from now. On twitter, the usual tweets of excitement were replaced by tweets like, "Looting: The New Olympic Sport" and "Can't wait for the Olympics.....should be a riot!" There was also my favorite, "Good luck with the Olympics, London. I'm outta here." Scotland Yard has made it a point all along to assure the millions of tourists it will be sure to welcome next summer they are safe and they have everything under control. The events this week have made some question whether or not that is actually the truth.

London has a long, sorted history with riots. During the student riots in November the situation was mostly peaceful and the pockets of disturbance were quickly squelched. These riots, sparked by a police shooting, seem to be much more spontaneous in nature. During the royal wedding in April there was tremendous planning and no incidents. I'm sure the security planning for the Olympic Games is beyond anything ever undertaken before in the UK and that these extraordinary measures will produce a safe and secure event for everyone. By the way, if anyone reading this has tickets and doesn't want to go please send your tickets to me cause I will.

In the meantime, tonight's images of flames and riot police will be replaced tomorrow with Londoners with brooms and garbage bags cleaning the city. Already, twitter has a trending hashtag, #riotcleanup. After all, this city is hosting the Olympics in 353 days. Citius, Altius, Fortius. Faster, Higher, Stronger.

Snack: Swim-Life- Should Senior Swimming in the US Take a Step Back?

2011-08-06T20:40:00.001-07:00

Take that Stone Cold Button! Ha!

I want to draw attention to another blogger out there, not just because he is Alaskan and that automatically makes him awesome, but because he is putting some ideas out there that deserve to be heard. Cliff Murray, Head Coach of Northern Lights Swim Club in Anchorage, Alaska has a blog called Swim Life. It is a collection of workouts and random thoughts about swimming. Recently Coach Murray has put a few posts out there that question the progression of Senior qualifying meets from the LSC level up to the Olympic Trials. Cliff seems to think that the old system with Regionals, three Junior National sites and the US Open made a lot more sense than the current system of Sectionals, Junior Nats, then Nationals. Cliff also is also able to give a lot of the dynamics that come into play that differ between large and small clubs.

If you have ever thrown up your hands wondering why there are such big jumps for senior swimmers to move up to the next step in the progression as I have, you really need to give these three posts at Swim Life a look:

Save Senior Swimming in the USA

Senior Swimming in America- The Progression We Should Be Following

The Facts About Senior Swimming in America

Check them out and sound off. Do you like the current system or is Cliff on to something?

Nighttime Snack: Tech Suits and the Anonymous Voice of a Pro.

2011-08-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

I know that Spidey's black costume turned out to be an alien symbiote that tried to kill him and all... but I couldn't help drawing a parallel between this picture and the tech suit issue.

In case you haven't been following along, Tony at the SCAQ Blog is a Masters Swimmer and has always loved his tech suits. At his blog though, no matter how vocal he has been about wanting tech back, he has allowed anyone and everyone to voice their opinion even if it disagrees. Apparently a professional swimmer decided to "school" Tony and the rest of us on what tech suits really did to professional swimming and the suit sponsor system that they count on, and this seems to be the voice that was missing from the argument the first time around. It is worth the read.

Yes you might think that reading more about tech suits is just beating a dead horse, but you need to keep in mind that FINA recently announced that they are considering equal coverage for men and women in 2013. This all could come around again.

As usual, Tony's blog has attracted many commenters who feel strongly about the subject and it is worth hearing what they all have to say as well. Check it out in Part 1 and Part 2.

Keeping it in Perspective

2011-08-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

Before this National meet started, I stated unequivocally what I would be watching for- the young swimmers that would replace the current generation of US stars. Depending on who you ask, we have just seen it. I remain more doubtful. While we did see a legendary NAG record go down over the course of this meet, the swims are not keeping pace with international competition. Why do I keep hammering on this point? Let me explain:

First, I've always made a point of compariing US results to international results. I've only had a blog for three years, so if it feels like I'm constantly pessimistic about swimming talent development in the United States, know that it's a recent trend. I write this blog as a way to engage with fellow coaches, swimmers and fans. So far no one's been able to give me a reasonable eomeback.

The most frequent arguments I get against what I write are on pool decks (I wish some of these guys would comment online). I will paraphrase them here -they range from semi-credible to ridiculous. The semi-credible retort is to show current results. We are certainly by far the strongest swimming country in the world and have proven that we only need a few stars to pan out to continue to do so. It is very possible that I am wrong and we will have swimmers comparable to Phelps/Lochte by Rio.

On the ludicrous end, I had the tired old argument that the 19-20 year old international swimmers that were so dominant in Shanghai are clearly products of doping. This is one of the most tired put downs we place on international results. The logic follows that if anyone is doing that much better than us, they must be cheating, because WE'RE THE BEST.

And therein lies the problem. I think that swim coaches in the United States do very little to study why pockets of success creep up around the world. We suppose that they are perhaps random, that in a few years Danish women's freestyle won't be really good and that this is the Faroe Islands one hurrah. I've tried to highlight those accomplishments in my blog to pique curiosity about just how those undermatched programs succeed where we do not.

Lastly, lest you think I am pointing the figure everywhere else, I know very much that I (and my cohort of college and club coaches) deserve a lot of the blame here. There is no lack of talent in the United States, nor is it that "kids these days" don't want to work hard. We have become stale and overconfident in our methods. It's time to look more outside the country, learn, and be better.

Nighttime Snack: Jeanette Ottesen to marry an American

2011-08-05T17:51:00.001-07:00

Occasionally here on the Swim Brief, I like to bring your attention to the very important work done by the Faroese swimming blog, www.svimjing.com. It has a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately, there are probably upwards of 50,000 people in the entire world who speak Faroese, so much of it's content is lost to the abyss. This will not be one of those times.

In a post today, svimjing excerpts an interview with recent world champion Jeanette Ottesen. It is interesting from the perspective that Ottesen talks about how far swimming falls behind the most popular Danish sports (soccer, handball and then everything else. Often in America we assume that swimming is so much more important somewhere else. Turns out that the only other place is probably Australia.

Oh, and Ottesen is marrying an American named Bobby Gray. They are honeymooning in Venezuela. That is all.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Morning Bowl of Gustafson

2011-08-05T05:32:00.000-07:00

Mmmmmm, Gustafson

Every now and then, Mike Gustafson writes for another website. Then he tries to conceal the article so that none of us can find it. Mike, listen to me. We accept you for who you are. Don't keep living in shame. We love your writing very much and we just want you to be happy. Luckily for us, we have trained internet lackies that discover whenever Mike has written something and send it to us. This is Mike's latest for USA Swimming:
http://www.usaswimming.org/ViewNewsArticle.aspx?TabId=1401&itemid=3567&mid=4614

The article is a great analysis of why Ryan Lochte is the social media star of swimming. So head on over and read it, ok?

Lifeless Crowds

2011-08-04T06:09:00.000-07:00

When's the A Final? It already happened????

All week I've been bringing you observations from the pool deck at US Senior Nationals out in Palo Alto. By the way I know that's not the official name but I don't want to type out the long drawn out name. Today I'm bringing a more downbeat one. As I probably mentioned, there are a ton of people at this meet. Upwards of 1800 swimmers. Throw in coaches, parents and other various spectators and you have enough people to create the atmosphere. Still, yesterday during the "A" final of the women's 200 free, one of my swimmers turned to me and said "when are they starting?". The swimmers were already a 50 into the race. That is both part of the problem and revealing.

I don't fault the meet announcer, Sam Kendricks, who does a good job trying to rile up the crowd during each and every race. I actually think the problem has far more to do with the content of the crowd. Think of the upwards of 3000 people I just told you were at the meet. Almost none of them are their because they just like watching a big swim meet. They're there because they swam, or know a person who is swimming. Could they get a little more excited? Of course, but USA Swimming makes very little effort to attract anyone to our premier competitions that is not somehow involved in them.

Even if they did- there would be room for precisely none of those people to attend the meet. I know what a difference such an atmosphere can make because I was in Omaha in 2008. The first men's final had Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte battling stroke for stroke for the world record. The crowd absolutely exploded. Here was a large group of people that were invested in results that had very little personal connection to them.

Of course, its hard to compare because the stakes aren't nearly as high out here in Palo Alto. But there are stakes here- and storylines that deserve to be followed. What if we actually tried to host nationals like it was a big time swim meet? Right now it feels like a lazy money grab for USA Swimming, wherein they attract as many people as possible to say they are at "Nationals", collect all the entry fee/time trial revenue, and then sit back and count the money. What if we invested in actually building excitement around our biggest national meet of the year, promoted it and held it in a venue where spectactors could come and watch?

If there is a consistent theme that cuts across swimmers, coaches and the bureaucrats it is a fear of change. We fear losing what we have so we don't take the risks to get a lot better. A year from now, post London, I think we'll have all the momentum we need again to build something in swimming. I fear we'll waste it again.

Nighttime Snack: Day 2 From Palo Alto

2011-08-03T16:36:00.000-07:00

Picture this packed to absolute capacity with people.

Another day in paradise, another nighttime musing from Nationals in Palo Alto. Here are some quick hit thoughts from the meet:

-If you've been on the Matt Grevers bandwagon, you may pick up a few extra members tonight. Grevers looked smooth and in control going 53.96 this morning.

-The most impressive 200 fly I saw this morning was University of South Carolina's Michael Flach, bouncing back from a disappointing 400 yesterday to make a surprise appearance in the "A" final. He came into the meet seeded with a 2:02 and went 1:59

-I hope we see more out of the women's 100 backstroke tonight- the field certainly has enough star power even with some of the swimmers tired from Shanghai

-Overall results are really fast or really slow depending on how you look at it. Slow from the perspective that the top times are nothing to shout about, fast if you look at the overall depth of the meet. If you're following from my original preview blog, we haven't seen any significant breakout swim yet.

Why So Many Comebacks?

2011-08-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

Why not come back? I'm faster.

As you can tell from our two nighttime snacks, the deck was aflutter with talk of Brendan Hansen last night. USA Swimming fans had been hungry for a breaststroke savior after that was perhaps the weakest men's event for them in Shanghai. There was an audible groan through the crowd when Hansen failed to break 1:00. Nobody was really cutting him any more slack after this morning- they wanted their Brendan back. Beyond his performance, I had a number of people on deck suggest a reason why athletes like Brendan have returned. It's related to the blog I just wrote.

Here's how it goes: typically each generation of swimmers in had a new one nipping on their toes in almost no time. For instance, Tom Dolan was the best IMer in the world at age 25, but just two years later Phelps broke his world record and never looked back. Dolan retired confident that the torch had been passed. Now, you could argue that current stars Lochte and Phelps do have a younger guy to pass too- that's Tyler Clary. But some of these other comebacks highlight areas where that just didn't happen.

The 100 breaststroke is a great example. I think its reasonable to say had there been a young guy coming up the ranks in the last decade who had been right on top of Hansen or breaking his records up the line, he wouldn't be making an Olympic comeback at 30. But if you're Brendan Hansen looking at this field of US breaststrokers, you still feel like you could beat all of them. Don't you feel like Ed Moses feels the same? He was long retired but then noticed that if he could return to form he has a legitimate chance at making the team. Unfortunately for Ed he is still a ways off.

The theory stretches to more events. How man years in the last 11 has Dara Torres surveyed the state of US women's sprinting and realized that she could be the best? It may be the best reason she continues to stick around- because she's good enough. Do you feel like Aaron Peirsol looks at the backstroke swims from this summer and thinks "Man, there is no way I can hang with our young guys!"?. I think he absolutely doesn't! Do you think Ian Crocker notices that the 100 fly winning time this summer was still slower than his 50.40 world record swim and wonders if he should make a comeback too?

The comeback mentality filters even to the not quite as great swimmers. It will also be another thing for me to watch as this meet progresses.

Nighttime Snack: Breaking News

2011-08-02T19:44:00.000-07:00

"I'm on a mission. I don't like watching World Championships on tv and I don't like Rowdy saying Kitajima is the world's best breaststroker."-Brendan Hansen

Brendan Hansen is back. We knew this from what we saw in Santa Clara but now it's official. Hansen swam 1.00.08 in the finals of the 100 breast tonight at Nationals. Hark, the breaststroke angels sing.

Nighttime Snack- Back in Cali

2011-08-02T18:16:00.001-07:00

This is my view for the first finals session here at Summer Nationals. It's not as bad as it looks- you can't see the scoreboard if you're on the other side and space is extremely tight. While many Nationals meets tend to lack star power when they fall this close to a major international meet, that is not the case this summer. I'm just about to watch Dana Vollmer, world champion, swim the 100 fly.

This meet is also serving as a qualifier for Junior national team service. If you are wondering if that combined with a lot of the world championship team being here makes for strong competition- wonder no longer. I had a swimmer comfortably make Olympic trials this morning- and finish 48th.

The meet is also so crowded they are running prelims in two pools. Oh and did I mention that Brendan Hansen is still extremely fast. Like, can we invent a time machine and put him on the Shanghai team fast? Cause he is.

Of course, Omaha looms over this meet. You can already feel some nerves 11 months away. Everybody wants that momentum, but not everyone is getting it.

Did I mention Brendan Hansen is still fast?

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Why This Nationals is Far More Important Than You Think

2011-08-02T05:10:00.000-07:00

I hope he's not alone.

I'm writing this on a plane out to Palo Alto. The fact that I'm doing so astounds me. I mean I am LITERALLY flying through the air. This is very cool. As I fly, I'm pondering the fact that many people are viewing this nationals as somewhat of a sideshow in between World Championships in Shanghai and the coming World University Games. Here's why they're wrong.

If you look only at medal count, Shanghai was clearly a success for team USA. After a down performance in 2009 that was primarily blamed on those pesky body suits, the US team won twice as many medals as the 2nd place team (China). In 2009 the US team tallied just 22 medals, in 2011 that number rose to 29. The number rose for several reasons: the US women reasserted themselves in the relays, winning two and taking silver in one after failing to medal in both the 4x100 freestyle and medley relays in Rome. For the men, Ryan Lochte boosted the count by taking on the 200 freestyle and several other role players chipped in.

However, if you look beneath the surface of the meet there are undeniable reasons for concern. All those reasons make this week's national meet, and the subsequent Junior National meet, all the more vital. Here are a few things that worry me as I look across our results:

1. Men's sprinting- What seemed like nothing to worry about twelve months ago suffered a downturn in 2011. Much of this, unfortunately, falls on the shoulders of Nathan Adrian, who was excellent in winning both the 50 and 100 free at last summer's Pan Pacific Championship. This summer was a different story, as Adrian regressed slightly while a younger James Magnussen dramatically vaulted past him. 2011 was also the year that France started showing a bit more of the scary depth they've appeared to have in the last few years.

2. Men's breaststroke- The performance by the male breaststrokers in Shanghai was one of the worst I can remember, Michael Alexandrov failed to make it to the semi-final in the 100 and Gangloff finished last in the final. Shanteau nearly medaled in the 200, but again our second breasttroker failed to make it through to the semi. What's more troubling again is the relative age of the swimmers involved. Germany's Christian vom Lehn is just 19 year old and likely to get significantly better over the next year. Likewise Hungary's Gyurta is still just 22, making him younger than both Keefer and Shanteau.

3. Women's Freestyle- As I've joked about on our facebook page and twitter, the US team is now behind tiny Denmark in every women's freestyle event save the 200 free. This is not good. Part of that has to do with the fact that Missy Franklin hadn't yet emerged as a force when this World team was introduced. She likely would have medaled in the 100 free and given her age should only improve over the next year. Still, Franklin likely won't take on the 400 or 800, where the US has had a serious drought of star power in recent history.

Now here's the good news for fans of America's swim team: we're still on top. The women's team is going to get a nice bump from Franklin. The bad news is that the trend is towards the best swimmers 20 or under being mostly being foreign in men's events. Consider this list of the highest finisher under 20 in each men's Olympic event alongside the fastest American of similar age:

50 Free: 21.96 vs 22.97
100 free: 47.49 vs 50.46
200 Free: 1:44.99 vs 1:49.37
400 Free: 3:43.85 vs 3:52.88
1500 Free: 14:34.15 vs 15:04.84
100 Back: 53.50 vs 54.90
200 Back: 1:57.23 vs 1:58.96
100 Breast 1:01.26 vs 1:01.99
200 Breast: 2:09.06 vs 2:13.53
100 Fly: 52.44 vs 52.21
200 Fly: 1:54.79 vs 1:58.53
200 IM: 1:59.02 vs 2:00.61
400 IM: 4:13.62 vs 4:20.55

As good as David Nolan is, he has to continue to improve rapidly to be competitive The lone faster American male is Tim Phillips in the 100 fly. Many events aren't even close.

Now to be fair, this is comparing performance from this summer to American performance mostly from last summer. But, it should highlight strongly just how far we have to come to keep pace with an ever quickening world.

Gutter Talk: Bodysuits Back in 2013?

2011-08-01T06:20:00.000-07:00

SwimNews recently reported that FINA will be revisiting the tech suit issue in 2013 with consideration of equal coverage for men and women with textile fabric being allowed to cover the body from knees to shoulders. Among other issues, some feel this would be beneficial in that sponsors would be given space to advertise, while others think that covering the male torso will eliminate some of swimming's sex appeal.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

"This is not enough. All world records should be erased from the books unless they were set in wool body suits. Period." Johnny W- Former World Record Holder.

"No, dude... stick with the brief. You know you want this!" Chris D- Swim Blogger


"Advertising space should be a priority if you want to grow the sport. You might think it's the mustache and the physique, but really chicks dig all the logo's." Johnny F- NASCAR Driver

"Getting rid of tech suits was just plain unfair to us guys with man-boobs. I haven't gone a single best time since Rome '09. Bring them back!" Brett C- Former Professional Swimmer

"Body suits are a bad idea. If we all wore two pieces, equal coverage wouldn't be an issue and the sport wouldn't lose all it's sex appeal." Tito J- Unemployed

"I bet I could make them change their minds..." Michael P- World Traveler

Late Night Snack: Wait, there's more!!!

2011-07-31T19:24:00.000-07:00

Yes swim fans, just when you thought it was safe to return to your job, your family and your friends remember Nats start on Tuesday! That's right folks, your National Team will stumble into the Avery Aquatic Center in Stanford jet-lagged, disoriented and exhausted. I expect Ryan Lochte to sit his ass down, open a huge bag of In n Out, crack open a case of Bud and order Coach Troy to scratch everything. At least Coughlin and Phelps had the wherewithal to just go home. Our very own Chris DeSantis will also be on scene without the distraction of Team Denmark.

Here's the psych sheet: http://www.usaswimming.org/_Rainbow/Documents/26b81e02-e130-480b-8e0a-ddeafd6d832b/psych%20sheets_11Nats.pdf

The Viking takes a break and the whole world of swimming falls apart...

2011-07-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

Michael's painful secret is out... his ass has dyslexia.

Dang, guys... the Viking gets too busy to blog for a week or two and everything seems to go crazy. (I haven't had time to even follow world championship results for that matter-- yes, feel sorry for me.) A partial list of what I found when trying to catch up on some of the old news I missed?: Mark Schubert got hired at a juco, they announced they are thinking about bringing body suits back in 2013, they let Cielo swim and he cried and pee'd everywhere all the time (you know, because that is what furosemide makes you do,) Chris DFLSantis made a crazy call about Dale Oen winning the breast and was actually right, more breaststrokers were caught on video cheating with dolphin kicks again, open water swimmers were withdrawing from their races, and now Phelps is swimming for Australia.

What?... Phelps is changing his citizenship?

Not really... I am sure some of you caught this story last week, but when I closed my hotmail the other night I came across this article that says Phelps forgot his suit at warm-ups at worlds and had to borrow one from Eamon Sullivan. I have to wonder if he got his butt chewed like my swimmers do when they are late for warm-up because they forgot their gear.

Hmmm... somehow I doubt it. That would be cool to see though.

Shanghai Day 7: Don't Cry For Me

2011-07-30T04:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess there was no avoiding it. After the top swimmer in the 50 free from 2010 (Fred Bousquet) missed out on the final we all knew where we were headed. Most notably, Nathan Adrian was far off where he was in Irvine. Cielo won handily, then shocked the onlooking crowd by quickly drawing a syringe and plunging it into his left bicep with a primal scream. I made up one of the two statements in the last sentence. Let's look at the rest of day 7 finals:

Missy Franklin continued to carry the US women on her 16 year old back with a victory in the 200 backstroke. In honor of Shawn's post from yesterday, here we go: OMG THAT IS THE MOST AMAZING 200 BACKSTROKE I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. MY ENTIRE NOTION OF A GOOD PERFORMANCE IN THAT EVENT HAS CHANGED. COULD WE SEE A TEXTILE 2:04 NEXT SUMMER? THIS IS CRAZY.

Phew. In the 100 fly the "textile world record" survived. Something tells me Ian Crocker doesn't even watch these races anymore. He's just somewhere hanging out and relaxing, content that he was once far better.

The women's 50 free is coming down as a battle for Northern Europe. Kromowidjojo was the favorite coming into the meet, but now Ottesen and Herasimenia have upset that probability. I'll be watching to see if the US women fall behind Denmark in a 4th freestyle event. The first three are the 1500, 800 and 100. Friis added the 800 this morning when she broke Kate Ziegler around the 400 meter mark of the 800 to earn silver.

Lastly, the 400 medley relay was never in doubt, especially with the US coaches using their discretion to insert Franklin onto the end. I think I need about three more of these before I'm not terrified of the Australians from when they had the best last three legs. Now, that's definitely the US. Nice feeling, eh?

Is it time to start officially calling them "Textile World Records?"

2011-07-29T18:05:00.000-07:00

Ryan deserves more credit for this one than he is gonna get.

After watching the replay of Ryan Lochte absolutely destroying the textile world best in the 200 back, I am a little saddened that we haven’t done anything official to recognize those achievements other than saying “while it is not a world record… it is a textile best.” Just listen to the commentators. It sounds like a let-down when they justify that the record he was chasing was "really fast."

He took it from a 1:54.0 to a 1:52.9. Before the days of tech suits we would have had our minds blown by that swim. It should be remembered in the same way that Mary T. Meagher was for being the first under 59 in the fly but skipping the 58’s completely in the process by hammering out a 57.93. If not for the tech years, our world record progression might never have listed a 1:53! Instead of being a dominating swim that changed the face of backstroke forever, it is really something we could pass off as a “pretty good try” in comparison to the 200 IM, a swim where he has his rival Michael Phelps within a tenth of a second of him. Yes, it was a true world record, but it was not nearly the dominant performance that the backstroke was. Lochte owned that 200 back. He is in completely uncharted territory with that swim, except… oh yeah, it’s not a world record.

We all have chatted about the issue before on various blogs, and have debated all sorts of options with asterisks and the like. I am not unhappy that the world records are listed the way they currently are. I am glad that news sources and bloggers have come up with a pretty standard way of describing it, but I still worry. Now that Lochte has actually broken one of the rubber suit records and the man vs. technology articles have finally been written we might all feel a little better about it for now, but when it is really gonna hit us is in London. You see, when Spitz took his seven golds a big part of what made it awesome and what made it that much more impressive to the world at large, is the fact that he broke seven world records at the games. There was an undisputed aura that went with his achievement-- he was the best. No doubt about it. Phelps, in comparison to that in taking his eight golds, broke seven records as well, leaving nothing to be dismissed for those concerned about it being less of a achievement.

In London, Ryan Lochte has hinted that he is looking at matching or possibly outdoing Phelps' magic eight golds. Just the fact that he might attempt such a feat deserves a little more reverence than the current system will give him. The sad part is that even if he pulls it off, it will be hard to listen to the commentary: “Lochte takes eight golds with one world record and seven textile bests” just doesn’t sound as impressive. Maybe I am splitting hairs here, but I am pretty sure that my non-swim-geek friends just aren’t gonna be as moved.

It really is not that I want to take the tech suit records away-- I want those athletes to be honored and recognized for the world-leading performances of their generation. I just worry that in London, even though I expect that multiple world records might be broken, many of the greatest swims in history might be overlooked as this one feels it is to me, and this whole mess will sink in a little deeper for all of us who are in the know.

Shanghai Day 6: Another Great Day For Denmark

2011-07-29T02:55:00.000-07:00

In other breaking news, Jeannette Ottesen is both TALL and BLOND. More to follow

Don't like overly patriotic Danish swimming coverage? Then go to another blog. The lead story for me in this morning/night final was Jeanette Ottesen of Denmark finishing in a tie for first in the women's 100 free. This makes two (!!!!) freestyle events where the Kingdom of Denmark is now faster than the United States with a third possible, despite the US's 60:1 population advantage and countless other resources. Here are my other thoughts from tonight's finals:
Everything panned out pretty much the way it was supposed to in the 200 back. Ryan Lochte won by a lot and Ryosuke Irie reaffirmed that he is pretty much just as fast whenever.

Likewise, the 200 breaststroke was the Rebecca Soni show, with Efimova only slightly making things interesting and McCabe of Canada winning her first world medal.

The final individual event was a victory for mega yardage where, despite a significant timing hitch, Daniel Gyurta had the best fitness down the stretch and won the 200 over Kosuke Kitajima.

The race of the night was undoubtedly the men's 4x200 relay, where France swam with the US for about 700 meters before falling to the undeniable Ryan Lochte. It was fun while it lasted, and gave hope that this relay just might be hotly contested in London next summer.

Lastly, thank you for all who joined us live! It was a fun experiment- we'll be looking for feedback on whether we should continue.

Live Pre-Meet Show 8:30 EST!

2011-07-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

We'll be live from 8:30-9. Afterwards check back for a recording of what we discussed!

Swimgating Shanghai: Day 6

2011-07-28T15:43:00.000-07:00

Before I say anything else- thank you for all those who joined Braden Keith AND THE ONE AND ONLY GARRETT MCCAFFREY and I yesterday for a live pre-meet show. We will be doing the same tonight at 8:30 pm et and we will commentate LIVE over finals at 6 am et on Friday.

I've now played this swimgating theme out far enough that I feel fairly ridiculous, almost like I am Brian Fantana trying to bring extra gravitas to a news story about a panda:

PANDA WATCH. Let's talk about Day 6 prelims:

The 50 free is up first, which means unfortunately there is one more chance we could see Cesar Cielo cry like a newborn infant. Hopefully, the fastest man in the world last year, Fred Bousquet will be up to the task. By the way is it any surprise there are 16 heats of this event at Worlds? What, the guy who earned the wild card for Rwanda wasn't up for the 400 IM?

Next up is the first round of the Swedish national event: women's 50 fly. I can't help but imagine that somewhere in southern Sweden, Anna-Karin Kammerling is watching this event with the same intense look she has in this picture, picturing herself winning:

Alshammar? More like Långsamhammar

One fly event on top of another comes with the men's 100 fly. Earlier this week I mentioned that a series of heats were held to determine 2nd and 3rd place in the women's breaststroke- I expect much the same in this event.

The 200 back will follow, which thankfully the US team actually managed to have Missy Franklin in from last summer. But seriously, picking the world team twelve months out who could have foreseen that any of our young swimmers would break out over that period of time?

The session concludes with two 800 meter preliminaries. One is the men's 4x200 relay, where the US has the two fastest guys and PVK looking pretty good. I'd say its a foregone conclusion who's winning that. The women's 800 will preview what I believe will be an awesome race between Rebecca Adlington and Lotte Friis. Will the year of the Danish swimmer continue? You'll have to tune in to find out.

Just Keep Swimming

2011-07-28T11:53:00.000-07:00

I have made it very clear I'm not a technocrat when it comes to swimming but what I saw this morning, alone in my kitchen with nothing but the light from my laptop and the life-saving grace of my coffee was magnificent.

I can't help it but when you become a parent everything is colored by that perspective. Even Missy Franklin and Ryan Lochte. I thought of my daughters who have been working so hard at their swim lessons. They're trying to perfect breaststroke which I realize with all the current events, is ironic and perhaps impossible. They received their report cards for the end of the session. The comments were identical: "Good job! Remember kick out and don't flutter! Your pull is really good!" Hahahahahaha. (Oh, my sides hurt from laughing. Things you don't write on the report card of a kid whose mom is a swim blogger. )

I think about the lessons we parents try desperately to instill in our children. Work hard. Be nice to others. Be good to yourself. Don't cheat. Flush. All the things we think will help our kids grow to be somewhat functioning adults. Traits perhaps we admire in ourselves or wish we could do better with. Mistakes we made we don't want to see them make. There could be blood on the floor due to our efforts, we just want our kids to be happy. Missy Franklin's ginormous brace-face smile and Ryan's fist pump and internal/external exclamation of "jeah" represents the culmination of all these things we try so hard to instill in our kids. They represent the best of the best. The exemplary example of what can be.

It says to me, as a parent, "keep going." The end result may not be a gold medal or a world record but we all try our best every day. Some days something monumental happens. Some days it's a small victory. Some days you just feel like you're sinking. The world may celebrate with you or you may pat yourself on the back in solitude. All achievements are magnificent in their own way. What's important is that you just keep swimming.

The Great, The Good, The Ugly: Day 5

2011-07-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

THE GREAT

Men's 200IM: I think Mr. Markus Rogan (@mahrqoos) summed up perfectly the men's 200IM with his tweet earlier today: "Competing with Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte is a bit like being a random third nation during the cold war. You're there, but that's it." I wrote my blog on USA Swimming's website earlier that every single swim fan in the world should mark their calendars for The Rematch on August 2nd, 2012. Because next summer, we could witness the biggest, most-hyped, and epicesterestnessfully AWESOME race in the history of Olympic swimming. Ryan Lochte is, now, the world's fastest swimmer ever -- shiny suits or not. He sliced one tenth off his 2009 WR and beat Michael in the process. Not that Michael has been training consistently. Which sets us up for next summer --- I hope NBC Sports Executives are licking their chops, because they just got a big juicy marketing steak literally handed to them.

Missy Franklin: What else can we say? 1:55.0 lead-off? That's incredible, and she's only 16 years old. Coming into the meet, I said that Franklin would have a big performance -- that she needed to have a big performance. Now she has had two epic relay performances. She's establishing herself, and she is poised to take the reins from Natalie.

THE GOOD

James Magnusson: Aussie Aussie Aussi Oi Oi Oi! We saw this coming in the men's 100 freestyle, but still, it's a big win for the young Australian sprinting superstar-in-the-making/now. Personally I thought Nathan Adrian would pose a little more of a challenge and dip under :48 (as did some of our readers) but alas, it just wasn't in the cards tonight. Magnusson didn't beat his 47.4 time that he swam earlier in the meet, which means he doesn't get my "GREAT" status, but this was pretty much great.

American Women: Though no American swimmer made the final in the women's 200 fly (see: UGLY) the rest of the women did well. Soni looked smooth and could be poised to break a SECOND world record tomorrow. The 800 free relay was very solid, including a strong swim from Knutson. Vollmer and Coughlin slipped in the final in the women's 100 freestyle, and hopefully will improve placement tomorrow. Solid day, women!

THE UGLY

Women's 200 Fly. Like Desantis said earlier, "I boycotted the 200 fly because no Americans made the final. I felt like it was the sportsmanlike thing to do." Indeed.

Backlash Against Felipe Silva: Check out this Swimming World article by John Lohn, who has been doing a tremendous job covering the World Championships thus far. SWM broke the story about the Silva butterfly kick at the end of the 50m breaststroke -- a race which he won. Since, there's been an incredible backlash against him. The truth of the matter is this: If you can find a loophole in the rules, swimmers use it to their advantage. Most breaststrokers do a butterfly kick at the end of a race. Because you won't get DQ'ed for it. Jeff Commings, the correspondent who brought this issue to light in the first place, was merely advocating for improved rules, namely, the implantation of video playback in swimming.

Which brings another issue to light: Should swimming use video playback to determine DQs? Most major sports have already used the technology. It's there. It exists. And if it aids in determining a more accurate result, why not use it? I'd love to hear your thoughts below, because I think this could be the next big issue in the swimming world (outside of the drugs, suits, etc, etc etc).

What do you think?