By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
The annual Collegiate Swimming & Diving Coaches Association of America (CSCAA) meetings took place over the weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. Retired University of Michigan softball coach Carol Hutchins, the winningest head coach in NCAA Division I Softball history, was the keynote speaker.
The conference, an opportunity for coaches to network, included a breakout session of NCAA Division I coaches in attendance that has so far created the most buzz out of the weekend.
One of the big takeaways from these conversations is that there is widespread agreement that the NCAA Championships won’t be going back to Pacific Time anytime soon after several teams struggled with the long travel and time zone changes. Federal Way, which faced several technical challenges besides being at the Northwestern tip of the west coast, was especially derided.
Besides technical challenges, Pacific time made for very late sessions in the Central and Eastern United States, where most of the top teams are.
Part of the challenge comes from Federal Way being the only championship-caliber indoor venue in the Mountain or Pacific time zones right now. While far more of the top collegiate programs are in the Central or Eastern time zones, it seems equitable for them to not have to travel every year, but the facility availability in the western U.S. don’t support that right now.
This conversation has reportedly been had at the highest levels of the NCAA, including the board.
Most of the conversation has been around how to improve the viewability and fan interest in swimming, which extends the conversations that are being had every day on social media.
The breakout lasted about 90 minutes.
Key takeaways:
Top mid-major programs continue to advocate for championship access via automatic qualifiers. One of the more interesting points they made is that mid-major swimmers can be active fans and drive ratings – one coach said his team watched NCAA Championships when they had a swimmer there, but not when they didn’t. One mid-major assistant coach was vocal about working to get more eyes on dual meets (which made huge strides forward last season thanks to Kyle Sockwell’s efforts, among others’), especially for those teams that don’t have real NCAA Championship hosts for most of their teams. To their credit, most of the more-vocal mid-major coaches are the coaches who are investing a ton of personal energy into generating more exposure for their teams and their programs, so they are ‘walking the walk.’ Some of that energy from the mid-major level could be a good addition to the ivory towers of the biggest programs, if it can be worked out the right way. One Power 5 associate head coach talked about athlete stories being important because that can gain a lot of exposure and those individual stories can generate a lot of interest. That associate head coach, ironically, comes from a program that has historically not been very media friendly – though that may not be a culture that the associate head coach has set. There seemed to be widespread agreement that the sport “fumbled” on telling the story of Gretchen Walsh and using it as a springboard for growth (ala Caitlin Clark). The CSCAA is going to talk to ESPN about whether they find more value in the individual successes or the team successes, so that the sport has some guidance on where to focus energy. Diving continues to ask for more exposure, plus platform and team diving events. The message back is that ESPN is currently less interested in diving than it is swimming. One head coach of a top 10 program brought up the idea of going to 12 athlete teams for championship meets. With roster limits and increasingly-imbalanced resources among programs, this could create more parity among the less-endowed teams that aren’t able to compete with the 22-deep squads at places like Texas.Read the full story on SwimSwam: What’s the Buzz from the CSCAA Meetings Last Weekend in Raleigh?
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