quatics International assembled a panel of five leaders from diverse industry sectors to discuss the future of aquatics. Our round-table dinner occurred at the National Recreation and Park Association’s annual aquatic conference this past spring. Participants included Shawn DeRosa, NRPA’s Northeast regional director, Lynn, Mass.; Sam Freas, president of the International Swimming Hall of Fame, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Connie Harvey, national health and safety expert for the Washington, D.C-based American Red Cross; Adolph Kiefer, 1936 Olympic champion and owner of equipment supplier Kiefer & Associates, Zion, Ill.; and Doug Whiteaker, senior principal, aquatic director at Ohlson Lavoie Corp., a Denver architecture and design firm. Representing AI were publisher Richard Coleman, editor Len Hochberg and staff writer AmyJo Brown.
Over the course of the evening, several themes centering on the industry’s need to work together emerged, as well as some proposed solutions. The conversation began with Aquatics International describing the challenges it faces in covering the entire aquatics industry, one that has many components with seemingly disparate interests and goals. Following is a transcript of the discussion, which has been edited for space. The kick-off question:
Is it possible, and necessary, for the industry to band together for its own good?
SAM FREAS About six years ago, we put together a meeting in Washington. We probably had 200 people from all different groups represented. We talked about what we have in common, what we can champion, and we argued for eight hours. We finally said, “Well, we want ‘every American to be a swimmer.’”
This group went and got National Aquatic Week declared, or Learn to Swim Week, in May. Bill Clinton had said that once you get everyone together — the YMCA and the American Red Cross, the YMHA, the JCCs, whatever organizations — so it’s not fractionalized, we’d all be for this. And we had something we’re all for.
Then things happened in Bill’s life and he couldn’t follow through with that. I turned it over to another group to do it the next year. When they did it, it was all about them. It was back to turfdom.
Everybody has to put their turfdom down so we can push up this industry to be something that it always could be, perhaps was, and to reach new heights. Somehow it lost it, and each year it kind of went down. They did it for three or four years. It has been attempted before through ... what was the group?
ADOLPH KIEFER CNCA, Council for National Cooperation in Aquatics.
FREAS Same dysfunction. Same territorial dysfunction. It needs to be apolitical. It has nothing to do with the Hall of Fame. It has to do with the industry.
LEN HOCHBERG Is aquatics more than one industry? Is that part of the issue, or is all this intertwined?
FREAS It’s all intertwined. A common thread needs to be identified, articulated and championed and pursued. And people need to contribute to it, and to lobbying [legislators].
SHAWN DeROSA There seems to be a common thread here that everyone’s in agreement upon, and it goes to some of the core things that many of the organizations are focusing on: health and fitness. We can tailor it to a swimming message because of the additional benefits of swimming as opposed to the other impact sports. But everyone wants to be healthy and everyone wants to live a long life, and what better way to do it than to swim?
DOUG WHITEAKER Earlier, Adolph said something that’s important. You didn’t quite get there to the end, but you were talking about football players — they’re freaks. Talk about basketball players, they’re unusual. When you think about competitive swimming, anybody can do it.
KIEFER Anybody can do it. Anybody can save the life of somebody else if they learn how to swim. So the whole theory is “a swimmer for life.”
HOCHBERG You were talking about the benefits of swimming in a health and well-being capacity and, for better or worse (probably for worse), a lot of people think of that as exercise and work. I’m wondering if the starting point could be just getting in the water, splashing around and having fun. A lot more people want to have fun than work and exercise.
FREAS “Baywatch.” I used to coach for the University of Hawaii and I wrote for “Baywatch” — it’s not the reason they were thrown off the air. [laughter] “Baywatch” was one to take this “everyone a swimmer for life” and keep it as a central theme all the way through their programming. It was very widely watched. Television is the mechanism that needs to be used that we’ve never done well at. Maybe a magazine/television show? Think about the fitness industry, how they have their competitions and cheerleading and all those types of things. We don’t have a water fitness competition on television.
DeROSA That’s kind of an unfair comparison. I mean, when we look at swimming in aquatics years ago — the shows — the synchronized swimming attracted attention. That was because of music and visuals. You look at competitive swimming …
FREAS And it’s boring. That’s my point. It doesn’t need to be. It can be very exciting. My point is that we haven’t sold [swimming]. People in our industry aren’t willing to sell it. They aren’t willing to take the first step, to sacrifice, to bite the bullet to sell it, to overcome that inertia.
DeROSA I’m always the devil’s advocate. I can’t see the American public saying, “Let me watch a swim show.” I mean, we know they’re not watching collegiate swimming; we know that they did tune in to the Olympics, but it quickly died thereafter. So from my perspective, while that would be a wonderful media blitz, it would be a costly media blitz that in the end is likely to fail.
Going back to the health and wellness component, we’re now looking at health-care reform. Insurance companies are starting to include aquatic rehab as part of their insurance coverage, so why not — and again we would need that one organization or that unified voice to attack the insurers and say, “Hey, listen, swimming is an important health benefit. You need to provide insurance for this and reduce premiums.”
Why not hit the medical market as well — the doctors themselves? They’re looking to the current Congress for a tax benefit for anyone who joins a health club. Why not try to lobby likewise that anyone who joins their swim program gets a tax incentive?
CONNIE HARVEY Coming from the Red Cross, we get media requests all the time, and they’re about “How do I keep my child from drowning?” The safety message is what the readers of these magazines from all spectrums — Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal and the parenting/health magazines — are interested in hearing about. It’s why you hear it on the “Today” show over and over and over. That is what resonates with the parents.
HOCHBERG That sounds like a huge challenge. In other sports, you could break a leg or a finger or an arm. When you’re in the pool, something terrible can happen.
HARVEY But I don’t think people are relating the outings to the swimming pools, the aquatic facilities with the drownings. It’s the drowning hazard around my house, whether it’s from the toilets and buckets or the backyard swimming pool or the canals that are nearby. So, our first message is always “Learn to swim, and learn to swim well.” That includes everybody in the family, from the children to the adults.
That certainly is our first message, but [the media] are looking at it from the perspective of “How do we stay alive?” So we need to do more of a job of connecting the safety aspect and then point out, “Oh, by the way, look what else you gain from having done that.”
KIEFER Once you teach a child to swim, you build up their morale; you build up their confidence. You give them an achievement that they didn’t have before. Swimming starts 21 new activities, so if we can start them off with this in mind, we open the way to 21 other sports.
WHITEAKER The fitness industry used to be very similar to the aquatics industry. But in fitness, they started a very vibrant organization and they have a very good leader who has done a lot to provide the leadership, the entry to the government people and the media access. He’s also consolidated a lot of the club owners. The fitness industry is looking for the global picture, and this has made a huge difference. We need to do that as an industry to achieve the success and the healthy lifestyle change that we all want.
FREAS There are plenty of great leaders out there, but the model, the structure, is the other key. People have to have a reason to buy in.
AMYJO BROWN What you’re saying is that everybody has their own financial interest, and that’s part of the problem?
FREAS Finances are important. Methodologies — there is a turfdom. It’s OK to have differences of opinion, but when you do this, you’re championing your commonalities rather than thinking about the differences. We don’t do that now.
HARVEY We’ve done some research and surveys over the past couple of years and it’s our understanding that only about 19 percent of kids in America ages 4 to 7 who should be in swimming lessons are. Oh my goodness! Eighty-one percent of kids in America aren’t learning to swim or aren’t enrolled in formal learn-to-swim programs — and that’s not just with the American Red Cross. We could not handle it even if we brought 50 percent more on. There have to be others who are there to provide similar services that the Red Cross does.
FREAS One of the beautiful things about this industry is that it is so vast. That’s great; it’s wonderful. We’ve just all got to come together, work together within a structure.
DeROSA I think the finances can’t be overlooked and, while I’m hesitant to say that government has to kick in that money, I think perhaps that is the best way. But the only way to achieve that is through a unified voice.
The NRPA just recently (within the past year) was the only nonprofit to sign on with a whole bunch of different federal agencies on the surgeon general’s report about child obesity. We’re trying to look at different ways we can now address the child obesity issue. What better way to do that than through active participation in sports, including swimming? Then we could try to get legislation passed that would provide more funding back to the local school systems, to [encourage them] to open up their pools and reinstate physical education. How many grammar schools only have phys ed once a week?
WHITEAKER If we could get that back into the school systems somehow, all these pools that are empty during the day when everybody’s in school would be loaded with people. We would have a lot more people coming into the competitive swimming venue. We would have a lot more people safe around water and when they’re going boating and things like that.
DeROSA What’s the big spark that would make this all happen? What’s going to motivate people to care?
KIEFER Nobody has any animosity toward one another; all the agencies agree on the common goals. No voting — there shouldn’t be anyone voting people in or out.
WHITEAKER This is a cynical way to look at it, but what sells newspapers is sensationalism. If we all of a sudden start promoting the fact that 5,000 people per year drown and talk about the stupidity of drowning, and I hate to say this, but if we started promoting that and we started talking about the obesity of youth and …
HOCHBERG But will reporting on all those drownings get more people in the water, or fewer people?
WHITEAKER How did drowning affect the boating industry? They got the Coast Guard to come out with flotation devices and things like that for water safety.
HOCHBERG Maybe I’m asking this question in front of the wrong crowd, but is the commercial side of the industry — the Swimming Hall of Fame, the Red Cross, the NRPA — are they more concerned with the industry and the growth and the benefits, while on the residential side, it’s the business? It’s builders’ livelihood — they make money, that’s their job?
FREAS Absolutely. Absolutely.
HARVEY Yeah, our mission is to prevent and prepare for emergencies and, because drowning is such an issue in the United States, we are going back to those very fundamental principles more than we have over time.
HOCHBERG …And is the residential side’s goal to put as many holes in the ground as possible?
RICHARD COLEMAN I think when you look at pool builders, they’re not in the swimming industry at all. It’s like a home builder — a home builder builds a house, a family occupies it.
FREAS I humbly disagree. It is a peripheral part of the overall aquatics piece. And [the builders] have money. Whether it’s the private builder, the local chapter or the national organization, there are not many people in aquatics who have money. I think it’s paramount to the growth of aquatics for NSPI to buy into the image enhancement of the total industry. If they did, their business would boom. Why don’t they see it?
COLEMAN Your challenge is: Does the individual builder want to sell benefits or do they want to put on [the pool], “Be careful, this can cause death?”
WHITEAKER I don’t think NSPI will ever evolve from where they are today. But some organization will.
KIEFER It includes not just swimming pools, but everything that we’re talking about today. So let’s give it that name then. Whether it’s CNCA or National Aquatic Coalition, give it a headquarters and get it started and have all these avenues come into play, and I think it would work. But there has to be a dictator at the head of it who’s going to control the politics that go along with it.
DeROSA I don’t think it’ll work. Do you think it’ll work? Another group, another organization? Just more bureaucracy.
I think the key is to adopt a vision, adopt a mission. If you’re concerned about health, about safety, about saving a life regardless of how you’re tied into aquatics, that is your main theme. And we, as a group, can just have another meeting and establish that dialogue and bring in a marketing firm that can take a negative such as drowning and put a positive spin on it with the ad message that “this could have been prevented.” That needs to be said at some point. You need the sensationalism; I don’t think you need another government agency. I think you need government funding by way of grants, and that grant money will come through insurance. The money will come as people become more aware of the importance of these health and medical issues.
Editor’s note: What’s your take on the issues discussed in this round table? Drop us a line and let us know what you think at aquaticsintl@hanley-wood.com.
