SwimWarrior was founded by ex-swimmers turned coaches.
We all started swimming at very young ages, getting our taste of coaching early on while in high school. After our collegiate careers, we decided to give back to the sport and pursued coaching full time.
Coaching swimming proved to be as enjoyable as competing at it! Teaching people of all ages a love for the water and the sport is the most meaningful work we've ever done. Although the job comes with many positives, it also comes with a host of challenges.
Coaching isn't easy. As coaches, we wear a lot of hats. We act as psychologists, life advisors, businessmen, accountants and more despite the numerous coaching tasks we are also responsible for inherent in the job title.
One of the most important tasks we have, especially as head coaches and directors, is to grow our programs. This was something that we, as new coaches in the game, quickly learned the challenge of.
Due to the many responsibilities required to running a team, we overlooked a key metric that all businesses must track in order to grow — retention.
The most effective way to grow anything is to simply retain more people.
We started looking at this metric because we noticed that we hadn't grown the numbers of our program from the start to the end of the year. We were starting the new season with the same number of swimmers as the last.
When we looked into the numbers we understood why. We were gaining 2-3 swimmers every month but also losing 2-3 swimmers every month.
As a 65 person team, this meant that we were losing about 40% of our membership base every year and we didn't even know it. A few years later, USA Swimming confirmed that the annual drop out rate for our sport is nearly 35%.
That means that almost 35% of our sport vanishes every single year.
This affects us all. It affects the swimmers and their culture as well as teams and vendors.
Thankfully, there is a vested interest in water safety that provides a healthy funnel of new prospects into our sport through swim school programs.
However, at this point, the acquisition rate is lower than the drop out rate. This means that our sport is diminishing in size every year and the numbers from USA Swimming prove it. We wanted to know why the dropout rate in our sport is so high. Fortunately, there's a lot of research on the subject of why swimmers are dropping out to this degree.
Multiple studies have been conducted interviewing swimmers who drop out about why they chose to stop swimming. Findings reveal that the main reason swimmers dropped out was because "swimming wasn't fun, engaging or motivating for them."
This left us with the question - why is swimming not fun, engaging and motivating for many of its participants?
We took a critical look at the sport to understand what might be reasons for this lack of fun in a sport that we have all loved for so many years.
We identified 3 major reasons:
Event Selection The events that players are able to compete in have a huge impact on their experience. The governing body removes many events that players enjoy early in their career as they age up. These include 25's and 50's of stroke and the 100 IM. As swimmers age up, less shorter distance events are available despite the interest swimmers of all ages and abilities have in these events. Unfortunately, this event format directly punishes swimmers who start the sport later, making it very challenging to explore strokes like butterfly and breaststroke. By not including shorter distances like 25's and 50's of stroke and the 100 IM, the sport pushes swimmers who prefer those races away altogether.
Time Standards The only milestone or goal available for swimmers currently is through time standards. Whether motivational or for meet qualification, these standards are based on age group, which can be demotivating for many, especially those starting later in their childhood. Time standards themselves are not a bad thing. The issues arise when it's the main or only method of tracking progress. Standards based on age group punish swimmers who mature later and swimmers who start later. The current motivational time standards framework (B, BB, A, AA, AAA, AAAA) isn't exciting for many swimmers. The framework feels like a grading system and there's no good way for swimmers to interact with it outside of the times search function or zooming into pdf documents. Comparing that to the experience modern youth have today with rich digital experiences, including comprehensive ranking systems that competitive video games have to offer, it's clear that this motivational framework is not effective.
Swim Meets The most meaningful way for swimmers to test their progress is through swim meets. Unfortunately, swim meets can be boring for many. We've heard coaches, swimmers, parents and ourselves complain about the long hours waiting around to watch their swimmer's race. The traditional swim meet environment doesn't appeal to a lot of swimmers and spectators. Many swimmers, especially beginner and intermediate, don't really like the atmosphere of a swim meet and prefer not to attend. We often look at these swimmers as "recreational" and don't always take their progress as seriously as those we deem "competitive". For most of these swimmers that don't like the meet environment, they are still consistently progressing at practice, but probably aren't being recognized for it in a meaningful way. By having an interface where players can track their progress from practice, and not only meets, we can better include these athletes into the competitive swimming experience.
For the last 7 years, we have worked on building an app that addresses these 3 core issues that diminish many swimmers fun, engagement and motivation with the sport with the goal of helping improve our overall retention rate. Here's what we've done:
Increased The # of Events Offered To make the sport more exciting for existing swimmers and to make it more accessible for new swimmers of any age, we’ve added 25's, 50's and 75's of each stroke as well as the 100 IM to the event selection that swimmers can compete in the SwimWarrior app. For beginner level swimmers (regardless of age), shorter distances provide a manageable challenge to execute a stroke in which foundational technique is still being learned. The 75's of each stroke also provide another building block as the gap between the 50 and 100 can be steep for even intermediate level swimmers. 25's, 50's and 75's all provide unique competitive opportunities, allowing swimmers to focus more on specific mechanics like starts, turns, underwaters, breakouts, etc.
Ranking System We’ve created a ranking system inspired by those found in video games that are exciting, rewarding and provides every athlete, no matter their age or skill, with a progression system that works for them. Our system scores and ranks times across 26 events for SCY, SCM & LCM. The system has a fun, competitive design that swimmers love but the system isn't a gimmick. The scoring system is a well calibrated system that accurately compares performance across all events. If a swimmer scores the same in one event and another, they are the same skill level in those events. We also provide stroke scores and and overall scores for swimmers based on their participation in the events offered. If a swimmer is missing a time in an event, their stroke and overall scores won't be as high as they could be. This incentivizes a deeper exploration of the sport.
Progress Anywhere Swim meets are great, but they shouldn’t be the only place where swimmers see progression. To address this, we’ve created a stopwatch feature in the SwimWarrior app so coaches can easily collect times from practice. The stopwatch allows coaches to select any number of events they wish to time, the swimmers who will be competing, the number of lanes per heat, and then the app generates the heats automatically. Coaches simply tap the screen to start the race and tap the screen every time a swimmer finishes. Times are then assigned in any order. It's the quickest and easiest way to store times from practice that everyone (coaches, parents & swimmers) can access. Coaches use our stopwatch in a variety of ways. Many of them use it for timed swims, some use them for test sets and others have even hosted entire intrasquad meets all from one mobile device.
We built SwimWarrior because we want to make competitive swimming more fun, engaging and accessible.
With the current issues around member retention worsening, we have decided to make SwimWarrior free for teams to help solve this problem.
If you think SwimWarrior would be a good fit with your team, click to this link to schedule an onboarding call with us. We'll help get your team set up and rolling.