In addition to the overall U.S. National Team – which honors the top 6 athletes in the nation in each Olympic event – USA Swimming also honors coaches for helping place those athletes on the national team. The National Team coaching program named 67 different coaches to its roster for the 2014-2015 season.
The criteria is both simple and complex. Any coach who places an athlete on the national team is honored as a national team coach. That’s the simple part. Of course, it can get complicated trying to define who is a given athletes’s “primary coach” at any given point, especially with the trend of swimmers training with one club while officially representing another.
USA Swimming has some guidelines for determining and defining coaches, and you can view those here. The main takeaway is that USA Swimming works to include the coach who actually writes and runs the workout for each athlete, instead just the head coach of whatever club the swimmer represents nationally. There can also be multiple coaches added for the same athlete, with different classifications for the athlete’s college coach, current coach, developmental coach and so on.
The National Team coaches are eligible to earn bonuses through the Coach Incentive Program. Coaches earn bonuses when their athletes earn medals at USA Swimming’s Operation Gold meet for the year. That’s typically the major focus meet for the national team; last year it was the Pan Pacific Championships.
You can read more about the coach incentive program here.
The full list of National Team coaches for the upcoming season is below. It’s a veritable “who’s who” of big names in the nation, and certainly a big honor for the coaches who qualified. You can also see the coaching list on this document from the USA Swimming website.
You can find more info about the program on the USA Swimming website here.
The criteria is objective. Single women or women with families who are career coaches have priorities and they all vary. Of all the women on this list I know several of them personally, and one very well. We spent a long afternoon at lunch discussing this topic, incidentally after disclosing to her my husband and I were expecting our first child.
The ratio of 50/50 (or close to it) is a statistic that doesn’t really have the ability to show why more women don’t make the list. I see many young women coaching both in club and in college programs.
I personally no longer have the time to commit myself to being a great full time coach while being… Read more »
Nat Team Coaches:
5 of 67??
Is it a hiring problem?
Retention problem?
Leadership problem?
I hope we can agree on one thing:
It’s a problem worth investigating, confronting head-on, and improving.
My opinion:
Female coaches are not given enough opportunity to attain National level program leadership positions in this country.
My honest question I wish someone could answer properly:
Where is the failure happening?
Failure of what exactly? US success in swimming?
Here’s my shot at answering:
For all the progress made by women in the workplace, we still have a culture where women are the flag bearers of the family. Let’s face it: swimming jobs are mostly not family friendly. How many of these male coaches are 1) married 2) have kids and 3) if so have a partner that works full time. I for one don’t accept that this “just the way it is”. We are missing out on a huge pool of coaching talent and hurting male coaches by not finding solutions to this conflict
An indirect reason that stems from this is that an old boys network persists, and it can be even more daunting for a young… Read more »
I think the other question to ask might be WHERE are the female coaches? Age group? High School? College? Elite level programs? Administration? If a majority of female coaches are working at the 12 and under level (for example), then is there a path for those women to work with elite level athletes? I know a few years back USA Swimming was encouraging female coaches and wonder if they have seen any advancement through the sport.
I think this is a good way to look at it. Another number that would be interesting is how many women are part-time vs. salary (or head coach/associate head coach/age group head coach, etc. vs. part-time assistant), compared to how many men are part-time vs. salary. I can only speak from my experience, but in my LSC, most of the female coaches I know (there aren’t many) aren’t trying to make coaching a career, so they just work part-time while working or going through school. That’s not to say that there aren’t men doing the same thing, but I’ve met more young male coaches looking to be a career coach. I have no explanation as to why, that’s just my… Read more »
From my experience, I’m not so sure that ratio is that far off the overall ratio of women coaches compared to total coaches. More men go into coaching than women, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The goal is equity of opportunity, not forcing equality of numbers.
This is actually not true. According to USA Swimming’s membership trends report, the percentage of USA Swimming registered coaches for 2014 year was 50.5% male and 49.5% female. Their actual numbers were 8893 female and 9070 male registered coaches for the year. Both statistics are available on the USA Swimming website.
Well, in that case my experience was apparently not the norm. Fine by me. Still don’t think it’s really an issue.
I expect you are male if you don’t think it is an issue. Narrow-minded. There are some incredible female coaches out there who are not respected or given a chance. Take the blinders off…
I predict that the percentage of female National Team coaches will rise once female coaches start producing more National Team swimmers. The criteria seems fairly objective.
just curious if there is a spreadsheet with the coach’s affiliate club and associated swimmer…
Jack Bauerle not on the list…I’m sad about that 🙁