Ok, we are going to get on our soapbox and drill down on what we think is the #1 problem in our industry – Swimmer attendance.  Full disclosure, in addition to founding and owning OneSwim, we also own our own year-round swim team.  We have been the coaches for a large board-controlled swim team as well as a host of other configurations of teams.   We now own a very small elite team that we train in our home pool (2x 25 yard lanes with an endless pool on the side).  We lose money and make no income from our swim team as it is nearly impossible to make money with just 2 lanes.  So admittedly, we are FAR from normal … but we spend a lot of time with all sorts of teams around the country and it is from that perspective that we are going to get on our soapbox and point out what we see as a glaring problem across the country…. Attendance.

We feel that the attendance levels across the country have eroded and now causing more and more teams to slide backwards in their overall performance.  When we roll back the clock by 10+ years, we feel the overall attendance was much better in the industry as a whole.  Accelerated by Covid perhaps and the changes in generations, we see more and more teams that we work with having increasing problems of having lots of swimmers with sub-par attendance that are being trained with (and slowing down) the more advanced (i.e better attendance) swimmers.   This of course has always been a problem in the industry but in the past we had more swimmers that attended ‘religiously’ than we do now.  In the past when 6 out of an 8 person group attended 90+% of our sessions, it became obvious to the swimmers (and parents) that attended less so they understood that their performance was a direct correlation to attendance levels.  Now the scales are a little slanted as, often times, our most athletic ‘natural’ swimmers may have poor attendance but look decent in the ranking within our swim groups…. further degrading the lessons we need our parents to learn by watching the high attendance swimmers out-perform their kids.  And the problem keeps eroding.  Only the very large teams can overcome this sliding scale of attendance by bundling their high attendance kids into their own groups and ignore the trend overall.  Mid-sized and smaller teams have to watch their team culture of attendance slowly (or quickly) erode…. But should you just watch it happen or start trying to reverse this trend?

We have a few suggestions:

1. Charge inversely based on attendance.   Take attendance each day and bill each month based on the number of practices they attended.  The swimmers that have 90+% attendance pay the LOWEST rate (NOT the highest!).    Incentivize the families to get their kids to practice.  Show families HOW important attendance is.  Show them how much the low attending swimmers hurt the team by charging them more.  Historically teams do just the opposite by having a sliding monthly fee scale that is less for lower attendance swimmers.
2. Reward attendance levels each month with any bonus you feel works for your team culture (special parties, special dive/turn clinics, special meets, etc…)
3. Require 90+% attendance to be in certain groups and move them back to other groups if their attendance slides off.  this can be painful at first if you have a coach for just a few swimmers… but hopefully in a year you can turn it around
4. Stop putting kids in the same groups based on age, but based on true experience and skill.   A brand new 14 year old swimmer should be training with 9 year olds, not with 16 year olds that have 7 years of training.  This is often hampered with board-run and municipality teams that are controlled by ‘what is fair’ and searching ways to limit the complaints by just putting kids in groups based on age… but this is always at the cost of your serious high attendance swimmers.  When we allow the low attendance swimmers to hold back our more serious ones, we hold back our serious swimmers so they never reach the level of competitiveness they deserve and slowly erode their excitement and commitment to the sport.
5. Start your attendance focus with your VERY YOUNG swimmers/families.  For our little team, our 12+ year old swimmers all have been swimming for many many years and it is impossible for us to add new swimmers in this age range without holding back our committed swimmers.   So we only accept brand new swimmers that are 4-8 years old.   We are finding that there are lots of young families that will commit to the sport and are prepared to slowly add more sessions per week as their kids get older.   So setting up your program to reward the even very young families with an inverse billing program, dedicated swim groups for 90+% attendance, etc… can be the most logical way to rebuild your team culture with your younger swimmers rather than trying to revamp your older families that are too engrained in their low attendance perceptions.

Just our 2 cents