Brian Robbins introduces Grown Up Swimming, a summer league for adults, and explains the concept of rec league swimming for adults.

Introduction to Grown Up Swimming - Brian Robbins introduces Grown Up Swimming, a summer league for adults, and explains the concept of rec league swimming for adults.

Brian discusses the process of starting summer leagues in different cities, convincing local pools to start grown-up teams, and organizing meets.

Starting Summer Leagues in Cities - Brian discusses the process of starting summer leagues in different cities, convincing local pools to start grown-up teams, and organizing meets.

Brian shares his background in swimming, from childhood to college, and his introduction to the Atlanta Adult Swim League.

Background in Swimming and College Experience - Brian shares his background in swimming, from childhood to college, and his introduction to the Atlanta Adult Swim League.

Brian talks about the acquisition of Grown Up Swimming by USMS, the perception of USMS, and the demographics of the swimmers.

Relationship with US Masters Swimming - Brian talks about the acquisition of Grown Up Swimming by USMS, the perception of USMS, and the demographics of the swimmers.

Brian explains the standard format of Grown Up Swimming meets and variations in different cities, as well as the inclusion of non-competitive swimmers.

Format and Structure of Grown Up Swimming Meets - Brian explains the standard format of Grown Up Swimming meets and variations in different cities, as well as the inclusion of non-competitive swimmers.

Brian discusses the hiring of league directors, the role of coaches, and the potential for coaches to become league directors or team captains.

Hiring League Directors and Coaches - Brian discusses the hiring of league directors, the role of coaches, and the potential for coaches to become league directors or team captains.

Brian explores the potential for educational resources, webinars, and cross-promotion with other events to enhance the knowledge and participation of swimmers and coaches.

Education and Webinars - Brian explores the potential for educational resources, webinars, and cross-promotion with other events to enhance the knowledge and participation of swimmers and coaches.

Brian discusses the interest in open water events, potential collaboration, and the significance of age groups in scoring points for the team.

Open Water Events and Age Groups - Brian discusses the interest in open water events, potential collaboration, and the significance of age groups in scoring points for the team.

**Grown Up Swimming Newsletter**

*Bringing Summer Swimming Leagues to Adults*

Welcome to the Grown Up Swimming newsletter! We are excited to share with you the latest updates and insights from the world of adult summer swimming leagues. 

**About Grown Up Swimming**

Grown Up Swimming is like summer league or rec league for adults. It's a social, competitive, but not really competitive swimming environment that brings the fun of summer swimming to adults. Our goal is to provide access to grown-up swimming for everyone, whether they want to swim, coach, or be part of the league management.

**Expanding to New Cities**

This summer, we'll be in probably about 20 cities so far, and we're looking for people who want to start a league in their town and those who want to start teams. We want to bring the joy of summer swimming to as many adults as possible.

**Join Our Team**

We are currently looking for league directors in San Francisco, LA County, Denver, and Chicago, and a few other spots. If you're passionate about swimming and want to be part of bringing summer swimming leagues to adults, we'd love to hear from you.

**Joining Forces with USMS**

Grown Up Swimming has been acquired by USMS, making us an official part of the USMS family of brands. This partnership allows us to provide a more laid-back environment for adult swimmers and create a feeder program for those who want to transition to year-round swimming with USMS.

**Opportunities for Coaches and Swimmers**

- Coaches are most likely former swimmers, and they're potential grown-up swimmers. They could become league directors, team captains, or just enjoy swimming in the summer leagues.
- We are also looking for swimmers who want to participate in the summer leagues and enjoy the fun and competitive atmosphere.

**Upcoming Events and Collaborations**

- We are open to collaborations with other aquatic sports organizations, such as water polo and underwater hockey clubs, to provide a diverse range of activities for our members.
- We are also considering the possibility of cross-promoting with open water swimming events and are open to exploring new opportunities to expand the reach of grown-up swimming.

**Join the Grown Up Swimming Community**

If you're interested in joining our growing community of adult summer swimmers, coaches, and league directors, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with us to learn more about how you can be part of the Grown Up Swimming experience.

We look forward to seeing you at the pool this summer!

Best regards,
The Grown Up Swimming Team

"Dive into Summer Fun with Grown Up Swimming Leagues for Adults"

- Grown Up Swimming is a summer league for adults, similar to rec league softball for swimming.
- They start summer leagues in cities, with teams from neighborhood, community, and country clubs.
- They put on 4 or 5 meets throughout the summer in outdoor pools.
- Grown Up Swimming was acquired by US Masters Swimming in late 2023 to provide a more laid-back and entry-level swimming environment.
- They are not sanctioned and do not focus on times, but on points and order of finish.
- They are looking to expand to other cities and potentially other countries, such as Canada and Australia.
- They have connections with Swim Atlanta and Dynamo Masters, and believe their model could be a case study for other swim organizations.

- The speaker discusses the potential for building community within parent organizations and recruiting for master's teams
- They talk about the need for more pool space for master's programs in some parts of the country
- The speaker suggests partnering with local water polo or hockey clubs to increase access to grown-up swimming
- They mention job opportunities for league directors in certain areas
- The speaker also discusses the possibility of offering additional resources and webinars for ISCA members
- They also mention potential cross-promotion with an open water swim event and the interest in organizing a grown-up open water event

- Discussion about interest in a grownup open water event
- Offer to help with event organization
- Conversation about age and participation in swimming meets
- Invitation for a 64-year-old to join a team for scoring points
- Well wishes to all swimmers in the league

Grown Up Swimming is a summer league for adults, acquired by US Masters Swimming, focusing on a laid-back and entry-level swimming environment. They organize meets in outdoor pools and are looking to expand to other cities and countries. They aim to build community within parent organizations, recruit for master's teams, and increase access to grown-up swimming through partnerships with water polo or hockey clubs. They also discuss job opportunities, resources for ISCA members, cross-promotion with open water swim events, and the possibility of organizing a grown-up open water event. The league is open to swimmers of all ages and wishes well to all participants.

City pools, where we're swimming 25s, 50s, maybe 100 IM for the distance swimmers.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, Mark, I appreciate it.

I'm Brian Robbins with Grown Up Swimming, and Grown Up swimming is summer league or rec league for adults.

Another way to think about it is that it's rec league softball or beer league softball for the swimming world.

When you go around to any country in the world, or in the US at least, you can find a pickup basketball game, or a slow pitch softball game, or shoot even kickball.

You can definitely find pickleball these days.

But to find that social, competitive but not really competitive swimming environment, it's really hard.

It's either lap swimming or master swimming.

And so What we do is we go around and we start these summer leagues in cities around the country.

And those summer leagues are, the teams are a mixture of neighborhood teams, community teams, country clubs, city pools that may or may not have a kids rec team associated with it, with the pool.

And we go and we convince these folks, hey, you should start a grown-up team.

About half of our teams probably don't even do practices.

And once we have those teams created, we put on 4 or 5 meets throughout the summer.

And outdoor pools, again, community pools, city pools, where we're swimming 25s, 50s, maybe 100 IM for the distance swimmers.

This summer we'll be in probably about 20 cities so far.

We're looking for people who want to start a league.

They want to be a league director in their town and people who want to start teams.

So team captains and league directors so that we can get ready for the summer.

I will skip on like how long ago it was, but I started swimming, I'm from Atlanta, started swimming with my neighborhood team growing up, swam club all the way through high school, ended up swimming in college.

I joke that I went to an unnamed ACC school.

I will keep them unnamed for to protect those involved.

And I think in 4 years I scored 12 total points in dual meets.

So it was above average high school swimmer that found out very quickly that the NCAA was full of those.

And I will say that I won 2 of the 4 chili cook-offs that our team put on.

So it was part of the group of my roommates that won 2 chili cook-offs.

1 of those was a split victory, but we don't need to get on that path.

But then once I was done with my 4 years there, I was kind of done with being the load man on the totem pole and didn't really want to get back in the pool anytime soon.

Until about 5 years out, I got introduced to the Atlanta Adult Swim League, which was the precursor to Grownup Swimming here in Atlanta.

And I started as the league director there and was hooked.

It was exactly what would get me back involved in the swimming community.

It was the first meet that we put on with this little 5 lane pool in Johns Creek, Georgia, called Midlock Bridge, where we had the music going.

Music going, there was a tiki bar that was serving lime slushies.

And we were just there to swim some 25s and there was probably a hundred people on deck.

It brought me back to the glory days of growing up in my neighborhood pool where I would swim a 25 butterfly and then go eat some of the grossest nachos you've ever had in your life.

And so we expanded, we grew like crazy over the next, the next gosh, 7, 8 years.

And here we are now officially part of the USMS community trying to get these leagues going in other cities.

So there's a relationship with master swimming.

So we are now officially part of the USMS family of brands.

And there's a couple of reasons for that.

1 is that the US Masters Swimming is the way it's perceived, It's not necessarily true, but the way that it's perceived, even with the name Masters, is that it's for the higher end, the higher performance level adult swimmer.

Now, we know that's not necessarily true, that plenty of Masters swimmers are lap swimmers, or they just go to work out, they're not competitive, they're certainly not world record holders, they're just there to stay fit and have fun.

But that's kind of the perception of like that top 10% is who USMS is seen.

And the demographics there are also a little bit older.

And so we came into the USMS fold to be able to kind of have a more laid back environment that people can swim in, a more entry level environment.

So I would say probably between 60 and 80 percent of our swimmers don't train year-round.

And a lot of them are swimming in their first meet.

We've got 1 of our team captains in Atlanta started a team with 70 people in her first year.

And the first time she saw a heat sheet was on deck at her first meet.

That kind of environment of entry level, but also more laid back.

We've got a ton of fast swimmers who come, but we're not sanctioned.

We care about points, because we give out trophies.

We care about order of finish, but we don't really care about times.

You're not coming to swim, see how fast you can swim at 25.

We're helping round out that as another service offering in the USMS umbrella as a separate entity, right?

Like we don't fall under the USMS rulebook.

We, gosh, yeah, we have a totally separate brand.

We, a different operating model, all of that separate entity entirely.

But we get to help be a feeder program for folks that want to get back into swimming and then kind of stair-step their way up to that year-round program with USMS.

The non-competitive USMS swimmer that doesn't compete in USMS meets, but trains year round, has a place to land during the summer and maybe compete a little bit.

And then I've talked with 1 person in Detroit that has some connections across the lake, but have not signed anybody to start a league in Canada yet.

Do you think this would be something that a big thriving USA swim team might throw out for its parents to do?

Well, I was a Swim Atlanta kid growing up, real friendly with those guys there.

Still help them out with some meets sometimes.

We've got some folks involved with the Swim Atlanta, less official, but we've got some folks involved in the Swim Atlanta community.

The Dynamo model is probably a case study for folks in your organization.

Because what they did is, if you look at our website in Atlanta, you will not see the Dynamo Masters in Multisport team.

But they've got about 50 to 70 swimmers, depending on any given, depending on the year, that compete under Maria's minions.

So if you know the name, Maria Thrash was a long time swim coach in Atlanta.

She coached at Sun Atlanta, She coached at Dynamo, she coached at Georgia Tech for a stint.

And then she ended her career, gosh, probably 15 years building out that Dynamo Masters in Multisport.

And she recently passed, but they named their grown-up swim team Maria's Minions.

Because it's, oh, that's a monster master's program.

They have hundreds of people that swim in their master's in multi-sport program.

I would say maybe half of Maria's Minions actually trains with that group.

That's friends of friends who got bullied into showing up in swimming 25s.

But, and so it's a perfect model to build community within your parent organization to recruit for your master's team, to maybe build that up.

There are certain parts of the country where there's no pool space for master's.

They're doing 20 master's workouts a week and all of them are totally filled.

And you got some parts of the country where they could totally use another 20 people in their master's program.

And so we kind of help them to fill that out as a revenue driver a lot of times.

In my city, we have a master's water polo team.

And I was gonna maybe twist some elbows there and see if I could get the master's water polo team to jump in and swim some 25s.

Now, you got to tell them that Growing Up Swimming is a non-contact organization.

to the lane rope and tackling somebody, then yeah, I think that's a great idea.

Would there be a possibility, and we have an underwater hockey group too, maybe that they could throw open a little clinic for everybody else in the league and say, hey, on Thursday, next week, we're having a little open practice.

If you want to give underwater hockey a try or give water polo a try, you know, come on over.

You know, I imagine some of the social networks could be positive.

We are, we are open at this point, we're open to any kind of relationship like that.

I think it was a couple of years ago, somebody showed me the first video of underwater hockey.

But yeah, no, I think we're open to any of those types of relationships.

Our goal is to get grown-up swimming, or get pretty much everybody in the country access to grown-up swimming.

Whatever that looks like, whether it's partnering with a local water polo club or local hockey club or, you know, masters groups, whatever it looks like, we want people to get access to it.

There's some history to how we kind of landed on our standard format.

But if you think about the summer league model, if you're 10 and under, you're swimming in 25s, maybe the long free is the 50 free, and then you have 7 and over, 7 to 7 8's, 9 10's doing the 100 IM.

And then in that same summer league model, 11 and overs transition to 50s of stroke.

The long free is the 100 free and the 100 IM.

So we kind of, knowing that we don't have a real split in age like that, our age groups are by decade, but we're not gonna change the format by age group.

So we kind of combine both of those and allow people to swim 25s of stroke, 100 IM, 50s of stroke.

Then we also have a meet that's just based off of the 11 and overs.

So in Atlanta, our championship or our standard format is 50s of stroke, 100 free, 100 IM, 200s for the relays.

And then we have some variations on that.

In Nashville, they voted and decided they didn't want 50s.

That it's just 25s of stroke, 100 IM, and the 50 IM.

I'm trying to think if we do any other...

Every 4 years we'll do that standard format of 50s of stroke long course for 1 meet because it's an Olympic year.

If I'm swimming a 50, I need a good turn to push off the wall.

It's a fun little thing to do every 4 years.

You said you were looking for certain people.

So we are, when we're recording this, We are still looking for lead directors in San Francisco, LA County, Denver, and Chicago are probably the 4 biggest areas.

There are a couple other spots that we're still interviewing folks in.

And our model is that we hire a league director.

It's a paid contractor position, so they're not volunteers.

And they're paid based off of the number of registrations that come through.

So it could be a nice side hustle for somebody that wants to spend some time building up this league in the summer.

And in that, league director is charged with recruiting teams, helping those teams recruit swimmers, scheduling meets, and running meets.

So it's a pretty simple, straightforward job.

They don't have to deal with registrations or marketing or legal or collecting waivers or payments or anything like that.

They don't even have to deal with meat entries.

The Grown Up Swimming corporate deals with all of that.

And so it's a pretty straightforward job that could be fun.

If you're going to be around the pool this summer anyway, might as well get paid to do it.

Oh, and I will say, if somebody sees this and they say, hey, I want this in Kansas City or Oklahoma City or Seattle, absolutely, Absolutely.

Coaches are most likely former swimmers, and they're potential grown-up swimmers.

They're also potential team captains if they want to spin up their own like Dynamo did with Maria's Minions and their their potential league directors.

So your coaches could fall under all 3 of our categories of league director, team captain, or or just a swimmer.

I just want to get in and swim for once in my life.

It's generally become an ISCA member at $75 a year.

And there's hundreds of articles and some videos and some past podium talks and such.

I imagine there are probably some people that are a little hungry for more knowledge.

I was wondering if there'd be a way that we could then maybe make an upsell, you know, so when they join, say, would you like to, you know, get this treasure of resources and charge, you know, a nominal amount, And then we could give a coupon and then they could log in and study to their heart's content.

And then that might, on your side, get people to say, hey, I can get my head around this, maybe I'll be a high school coach, or maybe I'll be an assistant coach with a club team, or maybe I'll learn up a little bit more and take my coaching career a little more forward.

I think that, I mean, I think that's a great value add.

Because, yeah, because a lot of our swimmers are coaches.

A lot of our coaches aren't necessarily master's coaches.

Yeah, no, I think, I think that'd be great.

Another idea that I would have is you have different leagues and different cities.

I'd be happy to work with a calendar and do a 20 or 30 minute webinar with each locale.

So we could, I'd love to interview the person in Richmond or the person in Tallahassee.

And then just to help grow the momentum, so to speak.

We've got this bandwidth and we should use it.

So that's an offer I'd love to get in touch with.

Now it's longer than 25, a 5K, a 10K, there's a 1 mile run, a 1 mile swim.

I wonder if we could cross promote a little bit with that.

And then we have a, I don't know if your people would like that.

It's in, it's around the area, vicinity of Virginia Tech.

So it's in Western Virginia in September.

I try to avoid open water swimming because there's things in there.

But I have been asked, So we do an all-star meet.

We go down to the beach, we do a happy hour.

The next night, we do an hour and a half long swim meet, and then we go back to the bar.

We've been asked if we would be interested in doing like a 500 yard, half mile open water.

And I've kind of stiff armed it a little bit because I don't have an open water background.

I don't know if I can run an open water event.

I bring that up because there's some interest from our swimmers in a grownup open water event.

And so I would imagine that there would be some interest in y'all's event if we wanted to.

Or maybe we could help turnkey something for you as well.

No, this has been absolutely delightful talking through some of

I'm excited to see some of these meets and go to them this summer.

And I'm sort of in the middle of my age group this year.

So I don't know exactly how fair, but who cares?

We need we need more guys in their 60s because like we score 16 places starting at 20 points and and we're our our demographic tends way younger And so those like 60 year old males, 70 year old males, clean house.

You get, you can go a 48 second 50 freestyle and get fourth and score 12 points.

So Middle of your age group doesn't matter.

Like you're going to be scoring points for sure.

Pleasure talking and good luck to all the summers and the league.


Speaker 0: City pools, where we're swimming 25s, 50s, maybe 100 IM for the distance swimmers. And it's a blast. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, Mark, I appreciate it. Yeah, so some background on who I am. I'm Brian Robbins with Grown Up Swimming, and Grown Up swimming is summer league or rec league for adults.

Another way to think about it is that it's rec league softball or beer league softball for the swimming world. When you go around to any country in the world, or in the US at least, you can find a pickup basketball game, or a slow pitch softball game, or shoot even kickball. You can definitely find pickleball these days. But to find that social, competitive but not really competitive swimming environment, it's really hard. It's either lap swimming or master swimming.

And so What we do is we go around and we start these summer leagues in cities around the country. And those summer leagues are, the teams are a mixture of neighborhood teams, community teams, country clubs, city pools that may or may not have a kids rec team associated with it, with the pool. And we go and we convince these folks, hey, you should start a grown-up team. And maybe have practices, maybe don't. About half of our teams probably don't even do practices.

And once we have those teams created, we put on 4 or 5 meets throughout the summer. And outdoor pools, again, community pools, city pools, where we're swimming 25s, 50s, maybe 100 IM for the distance swimmers. And it's a blast. This summer we'll be in probably about 20 cities so far. We're looking for people who want to start a league.

They want to be a league director in their town and people who want to start teams. So team captains and league directors so that we can get ready for the summer.

Speaker 1: Great. And were you a swimmer? What was your calling as a youngster?

Speaker 0: So yeah, my background is in swimming. I will skip on like how long ago it was, but I started swimming, I'm from Atlanta, started swimming with my neighborhood team growing up, swam club all the way through high school, ended up swimming in college. And then I was done, right? I joke that I went to an unnamed ACC school. I will keep them unnamed for to protect those involved.

And I think in 4 years I scored 12 total points in dual meets. So it was above average high school swimmer that found out very quickly that the NCAA was full of those. And I will say that I won 2 of the 4 chili cook-offs that our team put on. So it was part of the group of my roommates that won 2 chili cook-offs. 1 of those was a split victory, but we don't need to get on that path.

But then once I was done with my 4 years there, I was kind of done with being the load man on the totem pole and didn't really want to get back in the pool anytime soon. Until about 5 years out, I got introduced to the Atlanta Adult Swim League, which was the precursor to Grownup Swimming here in Atlanta. And I started as the league director there and was hooked. It was exactly what would get me back involved in the swimming community. It was the first meet that we put on with this little 5 lane pool in Johns Creek, Georgia, called Midlock Bridge, where we had the music going.

This is before the meet even started. Music going, there was a tiki bar that was serving lime slushies. And we were just there to swim some 25s and there was probably a hundred people on deck. And it was it was an absolute blast. It brought me back to the glory days of growing up in my neighborhood pool where I would swim a 25 butterfly and then go eat some of the grossest nachos you've ever had in your life.

And it was it's like this. The world needs this. The world needs this. And so we expanded, we grew like crazy over the next, the next gosh, 7, 8 years. And here we are now officially part of the USMS community trying to get these leagues going in other cities.

Speaker 1: Well, that's a good segue. So there's a relationship with master swimming.

Speaker 0: We were acquired by USMS in late 2023. So we are now officially part of the USMS family of brands. And there's a couple of reasons for that. 1 is that the US Masters Swimming is the way it's perceived, It's not necessarily true, but the way that it's perceived, even with the name Masters, is that it's for the higher end, the higher performance level adult swimmer. Now, we know that's not necessarily true, that plenty of Masters swimmers are lap swimmers, or they just go to work out, they're not competitive, they're certainly not world record holders, they're just there to stay fit and have fun.

But that's kind of the perception of like that top 10% is who USMS is seen. And the demographics there are also a little bit older. And so we came into the USMS fold to be able to kind of have a more laid back environment that people can swim in, a more entry level environment. So I would say probably between 60 and 80 percent of our swimmers don't train year-round. They're just swimming in the summer.

They're summer leaguers, like truly. And a lot of them are swimming in their first meet. We've got 1 of our team captains in Atlanta started a team with 70 people in her first year. And the first time she saw a heat sheet was on deck at her first meet. That kind of environment of entry level, but also more laid back.

We've got a ton of fast swimmers who come, but we're not sanctioned. We're not setting records. We don't care about times. We care about points, because we give out trophies. We care about order of finish, but we don't really care about times.

You're not coming to swim, see how fast you can swim at 25. We're helping round out that as another service offering in the USMS umbrella as a separate entity, right? Like we don't fall under the USMS rulebook. We don't sanction our meets. We, gosh, yeah, we have a totally separate brand.

We, a different operating model, all of that separate entity entirely. But we get to help be a feeder program for folks that want to get back into swimming and then kind of stair-step their way up to that year-round program with USMS. The non-competitive USMS swimmer that doesn't compete in USMS meets, but trains year round, has a place to land during the summer and maybe compete a little bit. Or do

Speaker 1: you have any teams in Canada? Is that in your focus area?

Speaker 0: Would love to Talk to how we do that. We have not. We've gotten some interest in Australia. And then I've talked with 1 person in Detroit that has some connections across the lake, but have not signed anybody to start a league in Canada yet.

Speaker 1: Do you think this would be something that a big thriving USA swim team might throw out for its parents to do?

Speaker 0: 100%. Well, I was a Swim Atlanta kid growing up, real friendly with those guys there. Still help them out with some meets sometimes. We've got some folks involved with the Swim Atlanta, less official, but we've got some folks involved in the Swim Atlanta community. The Dynamo model is probably a case study for folks in your organization.

Because what they did is, if you look at our website in Atlanta, you will not see the Dynamo Masters in Multisport team. But they've got about 50 to 70 swimmers, depending on any given, depending on the year, that compete under Maria's minions. So if you know the name, Maria Thrash was a long time swim coach in Atlanta. She coached at Sun Atlanta, She coached at Dynamo, she coached at Georgia Tech for a stint. And then she ended her career, gosh, probably 15 years building out that Dynamo Masters in Multisport.

And she recently passed, but they named their grown-up swim team Maria's Minions. And it's funny, right? Because it's, oh, that's a monster master's program. They have hundreds of people that swim in their master's in multi-sport program. I would say maybe half of Maria's Minions actually trains with that group.

That's parents of their club team. That's friends of friends who got bullied into showing up in swimming 25s. But, and so it's a perfect model to build community within your parent organization to recruit for your master's team, to maybe build that up. There are certain parts of the country where there's no pool space for master's. They're doing 20 master's workouts a week and all of them are totally filled.

And you got some parts of the country where they could totally use another 20 people in their master's program. And so we kind of help them to fill that out as a revenue driver a lot of times.

Speaker 1: In my city, we have a master's water polo team. And I was gonna maybe twist some elbows there and see if I could get the master's water polo team to jump in and swim some 25s. Has that been done before? Is that a good model, do you think?

Speaker 0: I think it's a great idea. Now, you got to tell them that Growing Up Swimming is a non-contact organization. Yeah, right. So, they might, as long

Speaker 1: as they're cool with not going

Speaker 0: to the lane rope and tackling somebody, then yeah, I think that's a great idea.

Speaker 1: Would there be a possibility, and we have an underwater hockey group too, maybe that they could throw open a little clinic for everybody else in the league and say, hey, on Thursday, next week, we're having a little open practice. If you want to give underwater hockey a try or give water polo a try, you know, come on over. You know, I imagine some of the social networks could be positive.

Speaker 0: Yeah, yeah. We are, we are open at this point, we're open to any kind of relationship like that. I think it was a couple of years ago, somebody showed me the first video of underwater hockey. It seems crazy. But yeah, no, I think we're open to any of those types of relationships.

Our goal is to get grown-up swimming, or get pretty much everybody in the country access to grown-up swimming. Whatever that looks like, whether it's partnering with a local water polo club or local hockey club or, you know, masters groups, whatever it looks like, we want people to get access to it. There's some history to how we kind of landed on our standard format. But if you think about the summer league model, if you're 10 and under, you're swimming in 25s, maybe the long free is the 50 free, and then you have 7 and over, 7 to 7 8's, 9 10's doing the 100 IM. And then in that same summer league model, 11 and overs transition to 50s of stroke.

The long free is the 100 free and the 100 IM. So we kind of, knowing that we don't have a real split in age like that, our age groups are by decade, but we're not gonna change the format by age group. So we kind of combine both of those and allow people to swim 25s of stroke, 100 IM, 50s of stroke. And then the relays are all 200 based. So 200 medley, 200 free relays.

Then we also have a meet that's just based off of the 11 and overs. So in Atlanta, our championship or our standard format is 50s of stroke, 100 free, 100 IM, 200s for the relays. And then we have some variations on that. In Nashville, they voted and decided they didn't want 50s. That it's just 25s of stroke, 100 IM, and the 50 IM.

So that's probably the 3... I'm trying to think if we do any other... Every 4 years we'll do that standard format of 50s of stroke long course for 1 meet because it's an Olympic year. But that's a 50 meters is too far. I need a flip turn.

I need to be able to turn. If I'm swimming a 50, I need a good turn to push off the wall. But you know, people like that. It's a fun little thing to do every 4 years.

Speaker 1: Excellent. And then are you hiring now? You said you were looking for certain people. What's it take?

Speaker 0: Yeah. So we are, when we're recording this, We are still looking for lead directors in San Francisco, LA County, Denver, and Chicago are probably the 4 biggest areas. There are a couple other spots that we're still interviewing folks in. But we're hiring for league directors. And our model is that we hire a league director.

It's a paid contractor position, so they're not volunteers. And they're paid based off of the number of registrations that come through. So it could be a nice side hustle for somebody that wants to spend some time building up this league in the summer. And in that, league director is charged with recruiting teams, helping those teams recruit swimmers, scheduling meets, and running meets. So it's a pretty simple, straightforward job.

They don't have to deal with registrations or marketing or legal or collecting waivers or payments or anything like that. They don't even have to deal with meat entries. The Grown Up Swimming corporate deals with all of that. And so it's a pretty straightforward job that could be fun. If you're going to be around the pool this summer anyway, might as well get paid to do it.

Oh, and I will say, if somebody sees this and they say, hey, I want this in Kansas City or Oklahoma City or Seattle, absolutely, Absolutely. We'll talk to them and get them going. Coaches are most likely former swimmers, and they're potential grown-up swimmers. So I mean, right? They're also potential team captains if they want to spin up their own like Dynamo did with Maria's Minions and their their potential league directors.

So your coaches could fall under all 3 of our categories of league director, team captain, or or just a swimmer. Like, hey, I'm sick of running things. I just want to get in and swim for once in my life. Let me actually participate.

Speaker 1: The Global library for ISCA members. It's generally become an ISCA member at $75 a year. And there's hundreds of articles and some videos and some past podium talks and such. I imagine there are probably some people that are a little hungry for more knowledge. I was wondering if there'd be a way that we could then maybe make an upsell, you know, so when they join, say, would you like to, you know, get this treasure of resources and charge, you know, a nominal amount, And then we could give a coupon and then they could log in and study to their heart's content.

Leverage more learning. And then that might, on your side, get people to say, hey, I can get my head around this, maybe I'll be a high school coach, or maybe I'll be an assistant coach with a club team, or maybe I'll learn up a little bit more and take my coaching career a little more forward.

Speaker 0: I think that, I mean, I think that's a great value add. Because, yeah, because a lot of our swimmers are coaches. A lot of our coaches aren't necessarily master's coaches. They are. Yeah, no, I think, I think that'd be great.

Speaker 1: Another idea that I would have is you have different leagues and different cities. I'd be happy to work with a calendar and do a 20 or 30 minute webinar with each locale. So we could, I'd love to interview the person in Richmond or the person in Tallahassee. Say, hey, where are these spots? Where are you weak?

What did you do last year? You know, what's coming on tap? And then just to help grow the momentum, so to speak. We've got this bandwidth and we should use it. So that's an offer I'd love to get in touch with.

Okay, ISCA hosts an open water swim. Now it's longer than 25, a 5K, a 10K, there's a 1 mile run, a 1 mile swim. I wonder if we could cross promote a little bit with that. And then we have a, I don't know if your people would like that. It's in, it's around the area, vicinity of Virginia Tech.

So it's in Western Virginia in September. It's a beautiful lake. Smith Mountain Lake.

Speaker 0: Okay. I try to avoid open water swimming because there's things in there. But I have been asked, So we do an all-star meet. We've done a couple of them now. We go down to the beach, we do a happy hour.

The next night, we do an hour and a half long swim meet, and then we go back to the bar. We've been asked if we would be interested in doing like a 500 yard, half mile open water. And I've kind of stiff armed it a little bit because I don't have an open water background. I can run a swim meet. I don't know if I can run an open water event.

I bring that up because there's some interest from our swimmers in a grownup open water event. And so I would imagine that there would be some interest in y'all's event if we wanted to.

Speaker 1: Or maybe we could help turnkey something for you as well. Yeah. Yes, so we could work on that.

Speaker 0: No, this has been absolutely delightful talking through some of

Speaker 1: this stuff. I'm excited to see some of these meets and go to them this summer. And I'm sort of in the middle of my age group this year. So I don't know exactly how fair, but who cares?

Speaker 0: Am I allowed to ask how old you are?

Speaker 1: I'm 64.

Speaker 0: Oh, you're a gold mine. Come sign up for my team. We need we need more guys in their 60s because like we score 16 places starting at 20 points and and we're our our demographic tends way younger And so those like 60 year old males, 70 year old males, clean house. You get, you can go a 48 second 50 freestyle and get fourth and score 12 points. Oh, we need.

So Middle of your age group doesn't matter. Like you're going to be scoring points for sure. Great.

Speaker 1: Pleasure talking and good luck to all the summers and the league. May the wind be at your back.

Speaker 0: All back. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it. You

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