After an eventful trip to get to St. Louis, September 11th-14th I was a delegate to the USA-Swimming Convention. This was my 4th time as a delegate, and once again it proved to be a great week for learning, networking, and helping move the sport forward.
I would strongly recommend coaches to consider attending Convention whenever possible. The Convention Education Committee does a fantastic job, and many of the educational opportunities are unique – nothing that you could get on a regular coaching clinic. The highlight of the week in that regard is always Russell Mark’s presentation.
Mark is a High Performance Consultant in USA-Swimming’s National Team Division. In more direct terms, his job is to review and analyze videos and race data from all the top swimmers in the country, and compare and contrast that with that of the best swimmers in the world. For those of us who do not work with National Team athletes every day, it is a great opportunity to see what the top swimmers are doing and try to implement some of those elements with our athletes.
This year, on top of all the usual great stuff, his presentation also pointed out the gap between the top US male distance swimmers and the rest of the world. Anyone watching the past few Olympics and World Champs was probably aware that this is the one area where the US has not been as competitive, but Mark gave us numbers that made it clear, and started a conversation about how to go about changing that. A few years back, he did the same thing with Butterfly, and the results of this year’s World Champs indicate that the US is closing the gap, so it will be interesting to see if the same thing happens with distance swimming.
There were many other great sessions at Convention, covering an wide range of topics. Some of my favorite ones were run by the Age Group Development Committee (examples and round tables on pre-competive programs), the Club Development Committee (interesting to see how this committee operates to ensure the health of clubs around the country), and the Coaches’ Committee (an open-topic discussion about some issues coaches are currently facing).
And of course, there were also the official Governance sessions, such as the Southern Zone Meeting (this year’s meeting was spicier than many previous ones) and HOD. I had also attended the Rules and Regulations Committee meeting earlier in the week (where the proposed legislation changes had been discussed).
To top it all, there’s always a great deal of networking that takes place. As I mentioned in the opening, I’d highly encourage coaches to take the time to attend. Between all the educational opportunities and the chance to keep moving the sport forward, there’s plenty of reasons to do so!
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