I am running for President of United States Masters Swimming. We have a great athletic and wellness program for adult swimmers. As all of you know, the benefits of swimming include reduced risk of premature death, coronary heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure as well as improved ability to think and get on with the tasks of daily living.

For the past twenty years, I have worked on our LMSC serving in various capacities, the last eight years as Chairman. I don't want to the president of the best kept exercise secret. I want to get the word out there to non-members to tell them about swimming and how it improves your life. I want to help expand Masters swimming. We need to get swimmers to coaches; to educate our coaches; and to find more places to swim.

We have a great volunteer base, our volunteers are committed to Masters swimming, the executive committee is made up of great people who are passionate about swimming, our Board of Directors is awesome; Rob Butcher is great marketer of Masters swimming with a strong national office behind him.

The Board of Directors has said they want Masters swimming to grow to 100,000 swimmers. We are not ready for that – yet. We can be. We can grow the organization. We can put in the infrastructure. We need to find coaches who want to work with adult athletes. We need to educate and train those coaches. For our LMSC officers and volunteers we need to help and train them where we can. We want continue our professional service and improve where we can.

We can do this, we can grow to 100,000 members, we can improve service to our members. I will work to make this happen.

US Masters Swimming is a great athletic and wellness organization. 20% of our membership competes in local regional, and national pool or open water meets. But there is 80% who come to practice for the benefits of exercise, swimming is always challenging us to do better. I have been blessed to be part of our local LSMC and I have served in different capacities in the national organization. I believe I am a good candidate for president of United States Masters Swimming.

I have had extensive experience in the local level, I have been part of many different meet organizing committees, I have worked as deck official in local, regional and national meets. I have been in leadership positions in our local LMSC for the past 20 years. I will bring my skills and what I have learned to the presidency of the USMS.

There are many challenges that face us, we are still in a transition from an all volunteer organization to an organization where the volunteers are the leaders, and we have staff to carry out the day to day running of Masters Swimming.

The three main challenges that I believe Masters Swimming face are:

One: To provide value for members, clubs and coaches and LMSCs. It is only the rarest of birds that joins US Masters Swimming just to receive our national magazine. We join our local clubs and LMSCs to participate in the swimming and competition that is offered in our local area.

It has always been my view that the LMSC is there to support the clubs and coaches; and national to support the LMSCs, then clubs and coaches.

In Pacific, in support of our clubs, we sent twenty-five coaches to SwimFest 10 in San Diego. We did that as an investment in our coaching. The leadership thought this was a great opportunity for the coaches to network and learn from each other. This year under the leadership of our coaches chair, we are organizing a coaches / swimmers clinic. Again this is for the coaches to network and to learn from each other.

We have to know where there is value. In our USMS “Places to Swim” web page, Jim Matysek did a great job of programming. Organizing the information about clubs and places to swim in a geographical manner on the web is no small feat. The presentation of this information is a way we can add value for a club (Join us and we promote your club on our website). I believe that for the non-USMS member, the only information that should come up is information about US Masters Swimming clubs and work out groups. For the USMS member, in My-USMS he can get all the information about what swimming opportunities there are in in a specific locale. We have created value – for the clubs – join USMS and we will point adult swimmers with a very desirable demographic to your swimming pool. For the USMS members, they get all the information about swimming pools in that area. We have created value for the club and value for the members. This is a reason to join USMS.

Most of our members do not go to our open water or pool competitions. In reading Tom Boyd’s analysis of a survey he did four years ago, he said that many of our athletes do not want to compete. In our premiere fitness event “Go the Distance,” the “leaders” are the ones who have swum the most millage, for some this is just another competition.

We know the non-competive swimmer is very interested in fitness. A recent CDC report said that adults should have 2.5 hours of moderate aerobic exercise a week. The fitness swimmer might be more engaged where the metric is how many times you have swum and met the health metric. We would encourage our non-competitive members to work on the health metric rather than compete in the distance metric.

Two - Engage the Volunteers – We are still transitioning from an all-volunteer organization to a volunteer led organization with professional staff to help with the day-to-day running of the corporation. When on the governance committee, I looked at other non-profits, there is always going to be stress between the volunteers and the staff. We have a great Executive Director in Rob Butcher, but there are going to be times when staff in their anxiety to get things done, will over step their bounds. It is the job of the president to work with the executive director to keep peace in the family.

In Pacific, we work hard to recognize our volunteers for the work that they have done. Each year we recognize some of our volunteers for the work they have contributed to the success of Pacific Masters. Nationally we have the Dorothy Donnelly award to recognize contributions at the LMSC level. Where we can we should recognize the outstanding contribution of our volunteers.

In the last couple of years we have instituted LMSC minimum standards - our expectation of what services we expect the LMSCs to provide and how to provide them. Our challenge will be to provide a consistent professional service within the context of 52 LMSCs.

The USMS leadership team must provide the direction. Our national committees provide the basic leadership and work of the organization. To me as a volunteer, at convention, I would get excited about the challenges facing USMS and the committee that I had been on or wanted to be on, but it would always seem that committee assignments were never done until the first of year. As your president, one of my duties would be to staff the committees as soon as possible.

Three: Strategic vision to get to expand the organization – we have committed to expand the organization to 100,000 athletes. I do not see Master’s Swimming have the infrastructure to support that goal - yet. When totaling the number of clubs and workout groups, we have over 1,500 groups. Only a small percentage of them are economically viable (able to support at least one full time coach). Economically viable clubs provide a stream of income for the aquatic facility (which pleases the aquatic director in this time of scarce resources), and money to support a coach. We need coaches who are interested in growing their program, then work with them to help them succeed.

We know that swimmers who swim with a club re-register at a higher rate than those who swim “unattached.” Our goal has to be to try to get the unattached to swim with a club –providing value for the team, the swimmer and the LMSC.

United States Masters Swimming has been a leader in the Masters swimming arena. Two years ago, when reviewing the standing Committees, the House voted to eliminate the International Committee and to have the work done by the national office and the executive committee. As president, I will outreach to the international Masters groups.

Many have spoken about trying to outreach to the Triathlete groups as a way to bring in new members. As chair of Pacific I have been negotiating with Tri-California, the largest triathlete group in California. We will advertise their triathlons and they will promote Masters swimming. We have also set up a Triathlete Coaches Committee as part of our coaches committee. A partnership is one way to put Masters swimming in front of the triathlete community.

Officials 1994- 2000 Sally Dillon, Bill Tingly, David Diehl

Championship 1996- present – Sandi Rousseau, Barry Fasbender, Mark Moore, Jeff Rodin

Rules – 1996-1998, 2002-2003 Tom Boak, Leo Letendre

Communication 2002 - 2008 Hugh Moore

Computer on-line 1995-2000 Jim Matysek

International Committee 2004- 2007 Sandi Rousseau

Board of Directors 2005 – 2010 Rob Copeland , Jeff Moxie

Work Out Groups 2009 – present; Rob Copeland, Nadine Day

Governance 2008 – present; Patty Miller, Anthony Thompson

Helped organized the first Open Water Swimming Safety Conference in Burlingame, California (2011), which brought together over 100 open water experts from around the world to discuss how to protect the athletes

Helped organize the first LMSC set of workshops at Convention (2004). LMSC are our regional governing unit. By training our LMSC officers, we can make the more efficient and better able to carry the mission of US Masters Swimming. We help them succeed.

Swim Meet Chair and Referee for the 2009 US Senior Games National Championship at Stanford, California; Senior games swimmers are very much interested in wellness and good health.

Meet Referee for the 2003 IGLA Championships, Stanford, California

Chairman, Pacific Masters LMSC, 2002 to present

Webmaster, Pacific Masters LMSC 1995 to present

Officials Chair, Pacific Masters 1994—1995

Meet Operations Chair 1992-1993

Certified Deck Official (Stroke and Turn, Starter, Referee) 1991 to present

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