Gator Swim Club…75th Best Program in America?

If you peel through the team standings at this week’s World Championships, you’ll notice that most of the country’s big programs (Stanford, Tucson Ford, Trojan, Longhorn Aquatics, SwimMAC, Athens Bulldogs, NBAC, Cal) sit in the top 10 of the team standings. One team you won’t see anywhere near the top of the standings is one of the best in the country: Gregg Troy’s Gator Swim Club. The program, based out of Gainesville at the University of Florida, sits in 75th place with only 19 points.

Troy has enough accolades for his program, not the least of which is being the home-training ground for the world’s best swimmer Ryan Lochte. His American swimmers came back from the World Championships with 8 gold medals, and yet they have only 19 points at Nationals.

But when you look at the official team rosters, things become more clear. One of the top post-grad programs in the country has only 10 athletes entered in this meet, and only 7 of them are Americans (and therefore eligible to final or score points). Many of the best swimmers who spend part or all of the year training with the Gator Swim Club are actually competing under the names of different programs.

Rexford Tullius and Ryan Lochte’s points count towards the total of their hometown Daytona Beach Swimming (which has only three total athletes, and is coached by Lochte’s dad). Peter Vanderkaay is scoring for the Oakland Live Y’s (aka OLY), which is the team he swam for in high school…but hasn’t trained with in nearly a decade. Elizabeth Beisel and her 200/400 IM National Titles score for Bluefish Aquatics, who currently ranks 15th at the meet (though in fairness, Beisel has done the majority of her international-level training with Bluefish). Conor Dwyer is competing for his high school club program out of Lake Forest, Illinois. Dagny Knutson, who recently moved to Gainesville from the FAST Training Center, is still competing for her A.S.K. program in North Dakota.

If you add those swimmers’ (at least) 176 points back into the mix, all of a sudden the Gator Swim Club is suddenly ranked well within the top 10 at this meet. As it was, Jamie Bohunicky, who is a Gainesville native, did all of their scoring.

While GSC might be the most obvious offenders, they’re not the only ones. I think that this unusual representation method is one of the (many) hinderances to these USA Swimming meets drawing serious fan interest. It would be much easier for fans who were never swimmers to get into a meet, for example, if they could be convinced that a 7th-place finish in a 10-swimmer final mattered. Or that a B-final was a meaningful race.

Beyond which, it would give people an easier rooting interest. One of the reasons why casual sporting fans can get into Olympic swimming is that they have a team to root for; that is they can be fans of the United States versus all of the other countries. Not only would it be easier for these same fans to get into meets like Nationals if they could track a score, it would give much of the country a built-in rooting interest. Florida football fans could be Gator Swim Club fans. Michigan basketball fans could be fans of Club Wolverine.

USA Swimming has tried to clean this up by way of instituting its “120 day rule,” where a swimmer must compete unattached for 120 days before they can score points for a new team, but without team scoring meaning much (especially for these big programs), the rule has little in the way of teeth.

What this likely comes down to is the grant money that USA Swimming awards to their gold-and-silver medal clubs. While these awards, worth up to $12,000 are based only on 18 & under performances, everyone knows that Ryan Lochte trains with the Gator Swim Club, but it’s easier for Daytona Beach Swim Club to attract top-level (and larger numbers of) age-groupers when they can tout that they placed two swimmers in finals at the National Championships. The Gator Swim Club, however, is effectively subsidized by the University of Florida (though not technically allowed, it’s hard to deny that the connection with the university provides a huge economic advantage to the program) and by the exploits of their post-graduate swimmers, and aren’t as dependent on the USA Swimming Grants (though, as a silver-medal club, they’re still eligible).

The Dirks/Gould Coaches Rewards program, which rewards up to four coaches (going all the way back to their age group years) of swimmers placing highly at each year’s major competition (last year, it was top 3 at Pan Pacs, for example) should relieve some of this financial strain, as the rewards are not as heavily based on who a swimmer currently represents.

It’s certainly admirable that swimmers want to support their hometown clubs, but this isn’t what’s going to grow swimming at a professional level. Kobe Bryant doesn’t wear a Lower Merion High School jersey. Peyton Manning won’t be enshrined in the Canton wearing a Newman High helmet. They do it by making appearances for their home town teams, or hosting camps and clinics for their athletes.

There always has and will be the debate in swimming about the best way to improve professional opportunities. One school of thought is to grow it at the amateur level, and hope that this increases interest in and visibility of the elite swimming. The other is that we get more people interested in the elite level, and hope that this trickles down to the youth ranks. The boosts in participation numbers that the sport sees after the Olympics indicates that perhaps the latter is more effective than the former, but there is a way to combine the two solutions. develop the professional, elite, team-ranks of the sport, and use community outreach programs (like those in the APA, forr example) to still allow those athletes to make direct connections to the youth level.