Many Swimwatch posts have discussed the decline in the standard of New Zealand’s top swimmers. The evidence is pretty overwhelming. In 2017 New Zealand suffered its worst performance at a World Championships, a historic low number of New Zealand records were broken and the country could only qualify two swimmers for the 2018 Commonwealth Games individual events.

We have heard very little from the Swimming New Zealand Chairman, Bruce Cotterill, or from the Chief Executive, Steve Johns, about why New Zealand swimming was performing so badly. We were told a new Targeted Athlete and Coach Manager would be announced in mid-January. Well today is the 15th January and we’ve heard no more. Johns did talk to the Stuff website about swimming’s lack of performance. The gist of his argument was that fast swimmers were only a part of the organisation’s role. Swimming New Zealand should not be judged on performance alone. Participation was what was really important, he said.

This is how Stuff reported the views of Steve Johns.

“Swimming NZ chief executive Steve Johns said the organisation can’t solely focus on the performance “shop window” of the sport. “Some people often forget that the mandate of Swimming New Zealand is everything from grass roots – beginners’ swimming – right through to high performance swimming,” Johns said.

“Often the HP bit becomes the shop window – and certainly the bit as an organisation we get judged on. It’s an area where we put a significant amount of time and investment into, but there’s the other part of our business which is about growing swimming and getting more people into swimming, making sure our clubs are more capable and able to attract more people.”

“A lot of our big clubs in Auckland and Wellington can’t really take any more people because they’re at capacity in terms of the water space they have available.”        

The first thing that needs to be said about all that is – it’s a cop out. All he is saying is we might have failed to perform competitively but the important thing is to get more people into swimming. That is what we were really doing. My thought when I read that was, champions don’t talk like that.

But then it occurred to me – John’s is shifting the focus of attention from performance to participation. That’s understandable. He does not have any performance highlights to talk about. So change the subject. But then I wondered, how have Bruce Cotterill and Steve Johns performed as far as participation is concerned? Have their holistic goals yielded success elsewhere?

To test that I went back to 2010; two years before Bruce Cotterill existed at Swimming New Zealand, two years before Miskimmin gave us the flash new Constitution. And for the eight years since I found the number of competitive swimmers, the number of clubs and the number of coaches registered with Swimming New Zealand. The results are shown in the table below.

So here is the deal. In the reign of Bruce Cotterill at Swimming New Zealand and Steve Johns for the last twelve months:

1. The number of registered competitive swimmers has declined by 850 swimmers, 13%. The decline has fluctuated by small amounts but has also been steadily downwards.
2. The number of registered clubs has declined by 15 clubs, 8%. Johns suggests that might be a good thing. His view seems to be that bigger clubs deliver better service. There is no evidence of that argument having any validity. Incidentally his pool space argument is puerile rubbish as well. Eight years ago, with fewer pools the sport managed to accommodate almost 1000 more swimmers and 15 more clubs. In the eight years since 2010 more pools have been built (The National Aquatic Centre for example), 1000 swimmers have fled the sport and Johns is still using pool space as an excuse for the failings of the organisation he leads.
3. The number of registered coaches has declined by 381 coaches, 61%. The decline is the one that would concern me most. Throughout this eight year period these pages have argued that Swimming New Zealand’s focus on the Millennium High performance coaching centre was destroying the infrastructure of New Zealand’s regional coaches. The figures now seem to support that view. And that holds true even if there has been some alteration in the counting method. Coaches deliver this sport. Coaches provide the excitement and interest. And today Swimming New Zealand has only half the number of providers that it did eight years ago. And the blame for that lies 100% at the door of Swimming New Zealand. They pursued policies that tore the heart out of the sport. And they were told. In 2017 membership of the American Swim Coaches Association reached a record level; and so did the number of competitive swimmers registered with USA Swimming. It will be a while before New Zealand sees record numbers in either category again.

And so it seems that, whether the discussion is performance or participation, the message is all bad. I personally don’t think Johns or Cotterill are up to the task of fixing it. My view is that they simply don’t know the product. What they say publically doesn’t make sense. Excuse the pun, but I think they are way, way out of their depth.