All last short course season, I watched as at meet after meet, we'd send the same 2-3 folks, while other teams that were our size or smaller would regularly send 10+ swimmers to the meets without fail. Even at Zones in April, we had to struggle to make sure we could put together a relay, and that was a local meet. For a team with a total of 150+ swimmers, that's a downright pitiful competition rate!
At Nationals and for a few weeks afterward, I communicated with a swimmer on one of the much more competition prone teams in the area, trying to figure out what they were doing that we weren't. Short answer, they were doing a LOT that we weren't! They had a group that was focused on competing, did lots of stuff together to build camaraderie, and a bunch of other stuff along those lines.
Probably the biggest issue we faced is that meets weren't publicized...at all. About 75% of the local meets last season were posted on team website's calendar, but they weren't announced. If you never looked at the calendar, the only way you'd hear about meets would likely be by word of mouth. The handful of us who were blatantly focused on competition all were in the know, but we did a pretty terrible job about spreading the news to everyone else.
Over the course of the summer, we started to broaden the path of our word of mouth meet announcements, but didn't really start hitting it hard till the short course season started in September. The head coach has sent several meet announcement emails out and I've made competition a key part of my coaching philosophy.
Every week, I send out an email to my evening swimmers letting them know the themes of the next week's practices, upcoming team social events, and upcoming meets. I also started a coaching specific blog (if you're remotely interested in reading it--it's kinda dry, since I target it towards my swimmers, not the general public--you can check it out here), in which I've added a calendar that has all the upcoming local meets on a rolling month-month and a half basis. And I REALLY plug these meets both in the weekly email and when I talk about them at practice! In addition, I've told my swimmers that I'm training them for competition, whether or not they'll ever actually compete. As far as I'm concerned, none of them are training just for fitness. We do extremely competition specific training, lots of IM work, lots of technique work, and plenty of other stuff that would be completely unnecessary for folks who're swimming just for fitness. I'd say 50% of my swimmers probably are swimming just for fitness, but they're getting trained for competition. Sure, they grumble when I'm having them do a long, hard IM set, but even if they don't compete, it's beefing up their general fitness! I don't know what the other coaches are doing, but I'd imagine they aren't staying mum on the whole competition thing.
...All of that leads up to this weekend, the first local meet of the short course season. The first meet of the season was actually a few weeks ago, but this is the first one that's within the DC area. I've been plugging the crap out of the meet for about a month and a half, both as a coach and to my fellow swimmers on Saturdays.
Last year we had 3 swimmers at the meet, including me. There were a total of 163 swimmers representing 49 teams. This year there are 200 swimmers representing 39 teams. We've got 19 of those swimmers! That was far more than my wildest expectations--I would have been happy if we'd gotten 7 or 8 swimmers signed up! Of our 19 swimmers, 11 of them are evening swimmers (counting me). I'm absolutely floored by the registration take up we've gotten for this meet! Who knows if we'll be able to sustain this type of participation rate for the whole season, but holy cow, this is a hell of a way to open the competition season with a bang!
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