Swimming Blogs - Garrett McCaffrey

I love watching football. But until yesterday, I hadn’t realized I love watching football more than swimming. The world cup was on fsn and I couldn’t stay tuned in long enough to find out who was commentating. I consider myself one of swimming’s biggest fans, and I couldn’t stay on the channel. There’s something wrong with that.
Don’t get me wrong, I think any TV exposure for swimming is a great thing. But when we get a window of exposure, we have to impress. Impress, not dumb down. I don’t know what kind of genius came up with this approach but you don’t have to dumb coverage down for the masses. We need the swimming community watching first and foremost, and if you bore us then you’ve already lost. Do you see dumbed down commentary during a football game? No. You hear strategic analysis, intelligent terminology, and detailed observations.
I try to ask everyone I interview, how do we showcase excitement in swimming? I’ve heard a bunch of different ideas. Bob Groseth at Northwestern suggested National Team vs NCAA All-Stars dual meets. Brenden Hansen suggested a format where one group of elite swimmers had to race random events. And I heard many many other exciteing ideas. But I think we can sell our sport without bells and whistles.
It starts with the commentary. A good play by play can make anything interesting. Lets use Nascar as an example. If you want to try to say that swimming back and forth will never catch on because its too monotonous, I say that’s Busch League… or Nextel Cup, whatever you wanna call it. We get that announcer to say, “boogity boogity lets go racing!” at the beginning of a swimming meet, and I’m staying on the channel. Hearing a comment like, “A good start in lane three,” gives me nothing as a viewer. It doesn’t inform me of anything, it doesn’t add anything to what I can already see, and it doesn’t get me excited. If we want people to get excited about swimming, we have to find someone who’s excited to talk about it.
We need to get over world records. We are in a spoiled era witnessing the greatest swimmer ever at his prime. But we have to find reasons other than world records to get excited. I watched Park Tae-Hwan for the first time yesterday and his 400 free was 2 seconds off the world record. 2 seconds in a 400. That’s a hell of a swim, especially for this time a year. But if I wouldn’t have known to look for his race, the accomplishment would have been lost in the boredom.
We have to make the guy who flips between poker and bowling stop when swimming comes on and say, “wow, I had no idea that so much goes into swimming.” And if bowling, poker, and especially nascar can hype their sports there is no reason we can’t come up with ways to do the same.