Debrief: Glenn Mills

Glenn Mills, the owner and founder of Goswim, 1980 Olympian and all around man about the sport, joins to talk about what he sees in the swimming world.

Debrief: Glenn Mills Chris DeSantis

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Hello and welcome to the swim brief. I'm Chris DeSantis, and today on the debrief, we have one of the biggest figures in American swimming. Glenn Mills. Glenn, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Good, Chris. I've been trying to lose weight. I do my best. You know? Come on. That's not what I mean. Stay active. Okay, all right. All right. Just checked in.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

You we're gonna get into this almost right away. I knew I was gonna catch you off guard with that one, but you you have been the person behind Go Swim, which I have been telling people is like the Kleenex of swimming technical resources. Like, you cannot, if I had a dollar for every time I was traveling around the country and somebody said, you know, like, oh yeah, if you want to figure that out, just go to Go Swim. Like I would be very, very rich. I I would stop doing these podcasts. I'd stop getting around to the um resource, you know, the conferences like the one we were just at. We were we just saw each other at the CSCAA conference. Like it's it's gotten that much sort of unanimity. And I know you're probably laughing too, because you're like, we could use some more unanimity across the world. But um, I'm really excited to bring you on here. It's it's long overdue to get you on. Now, I'm a historian, Glenn. Okay. Okay. And I feel like everybody should know everything about you. But I'm also realistic that, you know, the way things go in the swimming world, that's so much like focus on now, now, now, you know, the stars of the day, there's gonna be people out there who are probably listening to this who don't even know that you had an athletic career in the sport of swimming. Um so let's and and I think let's let's let's tell that story and let's tell it with the lens of because I think there are some there's some modern day resonance to your experience coming up through sport. There are things that, you know, the point of studying history is that we don't repeat our mistakes, but there are things that are resonating straight into the future. Tell people a little bit about your your origins in the sport.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

So I'll go through it very quickly. Uh I was one of the typical athletes. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and at the time that I started to advance in the sport, there was a necessity for me to leave where I was. And so I was one of those athletes that moved away from home at the summer of 10th grade. So my family was split up. My mom lived with me in an apartment in Cincinnati, and my dad came down every week, every weekend, for over two years just to see us. And so it was it was a total family commitment. I had no curfew, I could do anything I wanted, I just wasn't allowed to skip swim practice. And we had 12 practices a week with the Marlins with Skit Kenny and Denny Persley, and uh, it was all to train for the 1980 Olympic team. And uh so we had the best team in the country. We had six people who qualified for the Olympic team. Mary T was one of them, you know. So it was a we were the best team in the country, and it was it was uh it was great to be involved with, it's great to be part of that history for the Marlins um and uh for Ohio. And then, but you know, we didn't get to go because of the Olympic boycott of 1980. So we did all that, and um and I certainly don't regret any of the things that I did up to that point because I think the life of an athlete is that you're no matter where you are, you're trying to do your best, and it's not about the end result or the things that could be taken away from you. It's whether or not you did what you set out to do. Uh and my father actually gave me a sign, it was a quote by Jesse Owens that I hung in my wall at college that Jesse Owens said, it's not the Olympics that make the Olympian, it's the preparation. And so I know that all my friends and myself, we took a lot of pride in doing what we set out to do. And that's kind of what carries us through till today, because it is a it is a real strange badge that you have when you're on the boycott team because you are an Olympian, you're not an Olympian, you really don't know. And so 46 years later, we still have no idea who we are, but we're just people who used to be really good swimmers, and that's about it. Except for Craig. Craig Beardsley has been inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame, the only 1980 member who absolutely deserves a greatest 200 flyer almost in history. I mean, and the nicest guy in the world. I'm wearing swim across America for Craig. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Yeah. Yeah, he was at the event as well, and just like, you know, in pure Craig's Beardley Craig Beardsley form, you know, exactly as you described, just so gregarious and like personality that absolutely fills whatever room he's in. Well I want to ask you a question about that, and I I don't mean to like, you know, pick at the scab, but in you know, in terms of when you think about this, like this struggle for identity, even 46 years in the future, do you find yourself at there's been probably many moments since then where you have seen politics to larger or greater degrees, you know, intrude its way into the sporting world? Do you find yourself kind of reflexively like recoiling from those moments, even when you maybe agree with the politics or don't agree with the politics, just almost like like you just don't want that to be a consideration at all? I mean, how do you respond to situations like that? How do you find yourself?

SPEAKER_00 6:00

We have to remember why we're involved in sport. We have to remember what the reason is. And it's not necessarily the medals, it's not necessarily the times. It's about people competing on a fair basis with somebody else. Okay. It's did you prepare better, did you whatever? But it's kids getting together, okay? And um when when I swam and um, you know, I did make world championships and I was on the U.S. national team for many years, so I've been all around the world competing, and I've made friends in every place that I went to. And I still have friends all over the world from swimming. And the thing that drives me crazy is that people sitting behind desks that think they're going to use these kids as pawns to get something else to happen only hurt the kids because those people sitting behind the desk don't aren't impacted by it one way or another. And so I've always, and I say this very frequently on our Zoom meetings, that music, art, and athletics bring people together and politics rip people apart. We just, on one of our recent Zoom meetings, had a group of coaches from Iran that has been talking to me about the officiating of the sport. And I told them I wasn't the guy to do it, that I brought Jeff Raker in, one of the lead starters of US uh U.S. Olympic trials, to answer their questions. And of course, in the meantime, they had their internet shut down. And so I just found out before I went to China, I got a message from one of them that got a VPN through that said that they were okay. I literally thought they were all dead for the last two months. And it's those sorts of things that remind us that it doesn't matter what's going on with the other country. Racha has some Russian swimmers on her team. Okay. We, you know, she has Israelis on her team. And these are things that we deal with all the time. This is all about the athletes and the kids who are generally still pure. We haven't ruined them yet with our adult thoughts and politics and racism and whatever else we've learned. They're still pure, and we should allow them to play together. It's as simple as that.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

Yeah. Amen to that. I mean, I I didn't, I don't think I had we're going to be discussing, you know, Iran on my 2026 swim brief bingo card, but I I find myself thinking about that all the time. I mean, just in the sense of, you know, this this moment where as a as a student of history too, I think you have all these moments where governments, in order to justify, you know, oh, we're fighting these people, they're evil, right? And I I just I can't buy into it. I can't I can't buy into that somebody in, you know, 3,000 miles away really wishes ill on me. I think they probably just don't even think about me until you know, until that very moment when somebody from my country is attacking them. You know?

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah. Well, this is the beauty of the internet is that uh this one of these coaches had reached out through Instagram and started asking me questions. And I had no idea where she was from. And it wasn't until deep into the conversation, and really after about a month or two, that I realized she didn't speak English. And the only reason I realized that she didn't speak English is she came into one of the Zoom meetings and was listening. And when I asked her a question, she didn't know, but all of the communication she was doing through translation, and then she would upload the question. And then so what we did was we took the entire transcript of the meeting with Jeff Raker, translated it into Farsi, I think, and then sent that back to them. And so, you know, I know they have it because this was in between the two wars, but um, you know, these people are they're just like us. I mean, uh Rachel texted me when I got to China and she goes, What's it like? And I said, I could be anywhere right now. It all looks the same. It's just a big city. And the people treat you nice, and everybody is just people are good. 90, I would say 90% of the people on earth are good. And there are some bad out there, but man, I meet good people everywhere I go, and and that's what we hope to spread with kind of what we do.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Let's talk about go swim because this is something that I was first off in doing my research for this, Glenn, I found a start date for Go Swim, and my my brain melted. Like, I I don't think I realized 2001? Is it has it existed since 2001? I mean, you have been doing stuff on the internet yeah, for 25 years, Glenn. I mean, I just like can we just start there? What the heck was it like? I mean, just even before you started it. Like, how did you get a crazy idea to do anything like this in 2001? And for people who are using the website or have encountered it, you know, today, talk a little bit about like what it was like with the limitations of the technology at the outset, because it's just crazy.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

So my partner Barbara comes from a publishing background, and there are three different ways to teach someone. One is written, one is verbal, and one is video. Or one, you know, there's images and then and then uh verbal and and that. And so when we started out, we started doing these articles. We did the drill of the week. And so my my goal with the drill of the week was as a teacher and a coach, if I don't do something special enough that I can share publicly every week, I'm not doing my job. If I if there's not something that I'm not afraid to share, or even if I am afraid to share someone, give them an opportunity to call me out and say that's stupid. So that teaches me that maybe what's in my mind is not valid. But I had to share it publicly because I was on this quest of, I mean, my my whole journey has been I wanted to be the best teacher in the world for the person that was in front of me. And that's really what's driven me. And again, as someone who strived to be on the Olympic team, your goal is always to be the best. And that I don't say that out of an egotistical way. I say that just as how I'm driven. And and I learned so much from other people by telling me that what I'm telling them is wrong because I'm not afraid to try something and be vulnerable to my students. But when we started, we wrote the article. I took a what was called a film strip. There would be four or five clips or still shots of the video. The video was literally a we had to keep it under 500k GIF, basically, is what we would publish initially. That was the video. I mean, it was so small, but that was the only thing that played back then.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

And so there were there were the three components. There was the written, there were the images, and then there was the video. The video would have no sound on it, you know, and and it iterated from there. And then making the DVDs and that sort of thing was just something that, you know, it was that came from Ernie McGlishko, where Ernie, I was on one of his stroke films in the 80s, and it was very, very scientific. He's very smart, just an amazing man. And I wanted to tell the story of athletes from inside of them. And so our mantra, our method was we would ask them, what are the six things that you do that make you great? And we figured six days uh a week, a kid could think about one thing if they're training six days a week. So we would ask these Olympians, what are the six things that make you great? And then we would go film those six things. And that's what it is. So the original Ghostwoman videos were not me analyzing an Olympian. This was me talking to an Olympian about what they did. And the first time it really showed that there is not one way is I went from Jeff Rouse to Aaron Pearshall. So Olympic champion, world record holder, Jeff Rouse, to world champion, Olympic champion, world record holder, Aaron Pearshall. And you couldn't find two people that swam backstroke more differently than the two of them. And I thought, this is good. This is this is what it's about. Because I don't want, I don't want to ever create something that says, we I I like to say we are the antithesis of the YouTube video that says three steps to a perfect freestyle. Yeah. We're the complete opposite of that. So it's a daily learning event of what your freestyle is, and it's going to take a long time. I'm sorry. It just is.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

So I mean, you're speaking my language. I was just uh like I'm recording two podcasts today, and on the other one of these, we were having this conversation. It's like, to me, anything worth learning cannot be digested in you know, in a short amount of time. Like anything worth learning, it takes time and you got to think about it for a while. Like and it's it's one of the I think biggest challenges to what you do, to what I try to do, because we want to capture people's attention. And the the example that you cited, you know, the YouTube video, that grabs your attention, right? You go, oh my gosh, I want to have a perfect freestyle. I can't believe that by watching this video, you know, I will learn the secrets for doing it. It's so tempting, right? And it's so much less like sexy from a marketing perspective to be like, watch these videos and you'll get a new perspective on what it may take to improve your freestyle. Like, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't capture things in the same way, but the second one is way more honest. Do you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Yeah. Well, that's the that's the big thing. You know, it's one of the things that I would say when Rachel took our trip around the country, um, for those people that don't know, Rachel and I spent 16 months in an RV traveling around the United States in between a couple of jobs that she had. And we filmed 10,000 lengths of video. And I would say to all the kids, just as we were walking out, uh, I would thank them for the opportunity to work with them, to be invited to the team. And I said, if you're if your coach invited us to be here, they respect us enough to put us in front of you. And if we've said something to you that you've learned, and from here on forward you decide, you choose not to use what we've taught you and what your coach has taught you, I have no pity for you. I would say this to like 11, 12-year-old kids. I'd say, I have no pity for you. Because it's your choice. You can use it or you can not use it. If you don't use it, don't come to me later and say, you know, I didn't swim fast enough. Well, I'm I'm sorry. I I can't. If you have the knowledge and don't use it, that's your fault. And so now what we have to do as teachers and coaches is inspire the 10, 11, 12-year-olds to do it right so that they can maintain this and they do have a chance later in life to do something if they want to.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Yeah, I think, I think too, I mean, there's a challenge in that as well. I wonder what your perspective is on it, uh you were talking about these situations where a coach has invited you in. And I think a lot of coaches that I've encountered, not the ones that I end up typically working with, and maybe not the ones that you end up typically working with, but they can get a little bit defensive about an alternate source of information entering their ecosystem. And I've thought a lot about how to handle it. I mean, like sort of my approach to it is always I go, you know, listen, I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna say some things about psychology, about your preparation, this, that, and the other thing. And first off, I I don't want anyone to wield what I'm about to say as a weapon against your coach. You know, like that's the inappropriate use, that's not the appropriate end use of what I'm doing. I think you should look for where do where is there commonality between what I'm telling you and what you're getting from other sources of information? That, for instance, your coach, um, and then, you know, how can you have a conversation? If there's something here that piques your interest, how can you have a conversation with the person who's working with you the other 364 days out of a year? But how do you how do you approach that piece of it?

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Well, obviously, when we do our camps uh at Northwestern, if I'm asked to go to a team, you know, or if they see something on Go Swim, um, there's always the my coach told me this, you're telling me this. Okay, there's always that. And so my my standard comeback to that is that no one that you work with in swimming, no coach, no teacher, nobody that you work with in swimming is going to purposely tell you something that is going to make you slower. So we're all trying to help you. And so we're coming at it from different perspectives. And so everybody has a different eye on things, and so we're all looking at what do we think can help you? Now, for me, I'll have thousands of swimmers go through my eye. Your coach is going to have thousands of swimmers that go through their system. And so they can try different things along the way. The teachers can try different things. But you what you have to do as an athlete is you have to experiment to a point of understanding each one of these things to then make a logical decision on which one works better for you. Because, and this is another thing I try to leave everyone with this is your only shot. Your coach will have thousands of people, I will have thousands of people. You have one chance at this. This is it. So if you don't study and analyze what is best for you, and you just take advice from someone that you heard or you saw something on the internet, and you say, Well, that's what that's what Michael Phelps did, so I'm gonna do that. You're not Michael Phelps, okay? You're not that guy. You are you. You are special to you, and you have to know what you do, and that only comes through your search and your experimentation. And so, yes, take it all in. Nobody's giving you bad advice on purpose. Right. Okay. We're all trying to do what's best for you.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

One more thing before we move on specifically from talking on GoSwim, because I think actually we got all the way in on it as a concept, but I even want to talk more about the inception because one of the reasons why I've always wanted to have you on and it's long overdue, is you know, part of what I'm trying to do is I've seen that there's a gap, right? There's there's something that's not that I think should be a part of a curriculum for coaches, but it's it's just not there. Nobody else is doing it. And so I'm trying to step into that void and and provide it. I have a sense that you did the same thing. Like a lot of times the context in which you're brought up, to me, Glenn, is is that people will say, you know, USA swimming should be doing this. And yeah, it's Go Swim, right? That has just sort of like put something together. Um, and we both promise to be on our best behavior. We're not, we're gonna, we're not taking on the dragons, but like talk a little bit about that part of it. Were you just seeing like, oh my gosh, this is so necessary and like somebody's gotta do it. I guess it's me. Or, you know, was it was it was it more organic than that?

SPEAKER_00 21:08

It was more organic because really I still I still am the same guy. I still have, you know, what's that called? Imposter syndrome. You know, I'm still worried that I'm gonna say something where somebody's gonna say, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. And I still get that by sharing things on social media. You know, we'll take part of the Zoom meeting, we'll clip it out. And I I've changed what we share on social media because it would take 15 seconds of a three-minute long video, and that someone wouldn't get the context for it. And so I've stopped sharing that way. And I share more, it's consider it long form, short form. So it's like 90 seconds to two minutes of a Zoom meeting. And I still get called out a lot on social media because of something that somebody doesn't understand. And what we've come to realize is that we serve too many people. We don't have this one target. And so we've got learn to swim, we've got 80 Olympians in the platform. And so someone will get a message that it's meant for somebody. And so my standard response is if you didn't like this, it wasn't meant for you. Okay, it's as simple as that. But you can't say that to 175,000 people or whatever it is on Facebook and the other stuff. So the whole thing was not, and I would never consider that I'm the guy that should be answering these questions. And so I didn't start off that way. It was more again of me just trying to be brave enough to expose what I was teaching, offer that for free, and see what kind of feedback I got. And then it just kind of grew from there. Again, even the DVDs were not me as an expert. It was me as a reporter. You know, it wasn't, I never tried to put myself out there as an as an expert or the expert. It was always, I'm just trying to learn and I'm going to show you my entire process. And and so that's really what it was is everything that's out there is simply me asking other people, how do you do what you do?

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Let's go beyond. Let's let's let's blow out to a bigger picture and talk about coaches in general. You know, I'm even looking at my questions that I had for you. I mean, you can expand on this one if you want. The first one, I'm like, you big dodo, Chris, because I said, how do you maintain knowledge of the day-to-day challenges coaches are facing? I'm like, he's married to a coach, Chris. That's how he does it. He's got firsthand, like, he probably can't avoid talking about the day-to-day challenges that coaches face. So expand on that one if you want to, but I guess I'm more interested in general. Like, what do you see in the landscape out there for coaches? I know you talk about some of this stuff on your Zoom as well. What are some of the really big pain points that that they're facing these days?

SPEAKER_00 23:48

I think it's all pretty much been the same. Um, you know, it's how do we manage the pool time? How do we give them what they need to get? How do we make enough money doing this? How do we manage the parents? How do we monitor the technique? How do you know? And I think we're getting to a point. I think we're getting to a pivot point. And it's almost there's so many things that come into it to drive this, okay? But you can take any of those points and you can put them into what I think is going to be or has potentially to be the next philosophy of training. And that, and that is that swim less um, but make it what it is. This is a skill-based sport. And we've been since the since the 70s um an aerobic-based sport that skilled players come out of. Okay. And so with all of the problems that come with that, with this, you know, youth explosion, you know, the kids that are faster as kids generally have a plateau and then they leave the sport. You know, if we look at it as a whole, the burnout, the everything else that that takes place. So there's the mental side of it. So if you teach kids a skill, as they grow, that skill will become faster. But we put a lot of emphasis on national age group, national age group records, you know, how fast a young kid is. And those are the toughest kids to keep in the sport the longest, because they're going to be the ones that are mostly disappointed with what happens after they start to grow. People are going to start to beat them, the times are not going to be as they're not going to be as advancing as fast. And so if we try to marry, you know, what we know now with Cam McAlvoy training 2,000 a week, you know, which is the extreme, but now Van at Indiana is doing the same sort of thing. We look at our elite athletes, and then I go back through history. Okay. I go back all the way from when we went from however many hours you could train to the 20-hour rule of college woman. The 20-hour rule, those of us that are old would say the sport will die. There's no way you can only train for 20 hours. Can't do it. Okay. And what happened? Everybody got faster. I want to go back and I want to research, and maybe you can help me with this. I want to see what happened during COVID when nobody could swim for six months. They were doing dryland exercises, mental exercises, visualization. And then at the end of it, everybody swam pretty fast. And so when you look at the business side of it, you look, how many kids can we fit in the pool in our four hours? Okay. Well, if you start to look at swimming as a skill-based sport that you're going to demand these exacting things, maybe at a speed that's fast enough that makes kids excited. Maybe the practice goes from an hour and 15 minutes to 45 minutes in the water, and you can fit extra groups in. You can have more people in the water in your grid. And, you know, you just have to be creative with it. Now the kids are having more fun because they're not just going back and forth. When they are going back and forth, they're going back and forth fast. The coaches are looking for specific things during the workout. There's just so much, I think, that is going to change and it's going to be driven by some creative coaches on the age group side of things. And the college coaches, I mean, even Rachel and Dird and all these guys, they're as nervous as anybody else of missing the boat on something because their jobs depend on it. And you're going to get some, you know, this is the Michael Brooks of the world. The Michael Brooks out there is going to be the innovator at York, Pennsylvania. And that I go back to Michael because when we were on a trip, 80 teams, what team stuck out with me? York, Pennsylvania, 70-some kids with like four or five kids on the national team, because he coached every one of them very specifically. So it will be a smaller team that starts to drive things. And I think we're at a tipping point of how to train for swimming. And it's both business, it's both and psychological to keep athletes in the sport. And so that's what I'm really going to be interested in. And I'm going to be focusing on teams that do those sorts of things because I think that's the future of the sport. And sure, people are going to say, Johnti and I had this big talk about this. And he's he's on the fence about it too. And I said, Johnny, you train me. If I was a little kid and I was training for the 50 breast and I realized I could never win the 50 breast, what would I have done? I would go into the 100. And when I realized that I went from 50th in the 50 breast to 20th in the 100 breast, well, then I'm going to go to the 200. Where would where did I make the Olympic team? The 200. Yeah. And so if I if I continue to go with good skills, I'm going to go and expand on that. And we'll still have our top people that we need. We might not have the huge base, but the top people are going to find their way to the mile and the 800 and the 400. You know, we don't have to train the entire country to swim the mile to find the ones that are now, as the Olympics push the 50s and NCAA push the 50s. I'm sorry, I'm a 200 brushwork. I couldn't swim a 50 now to save my life. Okay. So I would lose my identity if everything moved went to 50s. But we have to save the sport first. It's not about this one person, it's about the entire sport. And we got to make it more fun. And we have to make training fun, teaching fun, all of that. And, you know, so I'm as much of a purist as anybody else, but we just got to look at the whole sport.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I I agree with you in the aspect that one of the biggest inefficiencies that I see in swimming is I think writ large swim coaches are actually quite sophisticated and quite skilled at training. They I mean, like the widespread we we argue about training, and you you know you bring up Cam McAvoy as an example, but like just just your average swim coach actually has a pretty good idea of how to get people in shape. They're good at it. Yeah, right. But I see, and I mean, uh this is an aspect where I start talking about it, and I'm like, I would like to have to figure out to do something new with my life because I would, you know, if if this was addressed. But the the physical fitness of so many of our top athletes just so far outpaces the psychological development and the skill development. And so they're just completely misaligned, right? And it starts to sort of, you know, if you think about it as like a three-legged stool, it just starts to tip over. And it's unfortunate, I think, for a lot of athletes as they get to the higher levels. I think it, you know, the issue in terms of some athletes struggling, you know, in college swimming, I don't think it has to do with them not being in good shape enough. They're coming in in great shape to swim in college, but they're not really psychologically, they haven't matured to the place where they are, and they don't have skills in terms of the way that they swim to capitalize on the fact that they're, you know, sort of growing into these adult bodies. And and if they were more skilled, then it would just be all upside for them, particularly a lot of females at that point. Male, like college swimming for for women is a disaster. I think, you know, when you just look across the country, like if you get you get above 40% PBs on a women's college swim team, that's like spectacular results. I mean, you're way above average. And it's that's to me, I'm like, as a coach, I have to look in and and this is not me talking shit on anyone. It's like we can do better than that. We got to be able to do better than that. I think it's not like any one individual, it's not some, you know, college coach on an individual level that just doesn't know how to coach women, it's it's a system that we've built that's funneling things upwards and putting people in a really tough position. And to where, frankly, as you point out, even at the level where we sort of sorted out more of the fun part, like a college dual meet is pretty fun to watch in comparison to a club meet. But I would argue, again, especially on the women's side, many college women don't have a positive experience in the sport. They don't they don't have a good time swimming in college. And that's like that's such a shame because we have all these opportunities out there, and yet, you know, if if that has a trickle down even to the levels, if that's not like a carrot at the end of everything to where you're gonna get there and you're gonna enjoy your experience and you're gonna continue to develop and you're gonna continue to get better, I think, you know, it it it puts a lot of downward pressure in the sport.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

Yeah. And and like I said, my so much of my focus is on what can we do for the kids. I keep pushing further and further down with with my focus. I mean, rather than like I said, we have 80 Olympicans in the system. What what's the difference if we have 90? I mean, it's just they're amazing. And so I look, I look down at how do we make this better for the young experience? And one of the things we do at all our camps here is like the first, and that and hopefully no one will be watching this that's coming to camp because a lot of it's psychological as well. But I'll give the I'll give the first thing we do is I'll I'll film everybody in our app with data for a 25 breaststroke. Don't tell them anything, get them warmed up, and then just say, You're gonna swim a 25 breaststroke. And you film them and you get the data in the app. But waiting at the other end is uh a counselor. And so when they get to the counselor, the counselor says, Okay, that was great. Now I want you to do another one, and this time you're gonna do three count glide. And so these young kids, and I use breaststroke mainly because you can see the biggest amount of difference in the shortest amount of time. Okay, if they actually listen to you and do a two or three count glide, they're in the line for three count, they're underwater, and what they're not doing is setting up the next stroke, which is this accordion sort of effect, push me, pull me, start, stop, start, stop. They're just gliding. And then we go into the classroom and we look at the two and the data, and I teach them very quickly what distance per cycle is, and how distance per cycle, they're about the same time, if not a half a second to a second slower on the 25, but at least 50% less strokes. And so from a teaching perspective, we're trying to get across to them that these are the things they have to learn. And so through the throughout the course of the camp, we're gamifying the math of swimming. We gamify breakout point by you don't have to swim as far. And that was that was taught to me. I worked with this one little kid, I'll never forget it, you know, where we really learned things. He just wouldn't streamline. I think it was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I could picture it in my head. He wouldn't streamline. I met him at the end of every length, and I said, Dude, you got a streamline and every length, and he wouldn't do it. And I finally got him out and I said, Can you physically show me a streamline? Because I wanted to make sure he could do it. And he did it. And I said, Look, you're perfectly able to do this. Why aren't you doing it when you push off? And he looked me straight in the face and he says, Well, I'm lazy. And just like that, he's he says, I'm lazy. And I go, and it hit me. I said, dude, I said, this is the way for lazy people. I said, if you do this, you go farther without doing anything. So I completely changed my message to him. And guess what he did on the next lap? He streamlined because he started to understand. So I had to find out what his language was. And so if we can teach these kids what the math is by telling them it's gonna be much easier. It'll be harder for a little bit, but it's gonna be much easier to do it this way. And, you know, and and a two-inch increase in distance per cycle is how I try to teach them. Not you're gonna change your stroke. We're gonna see what it takes to go two inches more distance per cycle and make it palatable to them to learn in these incremental ways. And that's kind of what we're tracking in the app is how do we make this gamified for the kids so that they can actually see what they're doing. And then hopefully it makes it better, a better experience for them.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

Yeah. All right, I'm gonna ask you the most dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous question.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Beard Beardsley's calling. I'm gonna put him on hold here.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Beardsley, we're recording a podcast.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

I'll put it on sphere. I just wanted to say, yeah, it's it's really him.

SPEAKER_01 36:20

Yeah, he knew he knew I was about to ask you. Yeah. He knew I was about to ask you the hardest question of the podcast, and he was looking to preemptor the most dangerous question, the question that could get you in the most trouble, right? And that is, all right, you know, we're talking about all this big picture stuff. I let's just imagine, you know, like a genie comes to you and and says, Glenn Mills, I'm gonna put you in charge of the sport of swimming, and you know, I'm gonna grant you swimming specific wishes, and you can just you can just make these global changes to the culture, to the way things go. What do you do? What would you what would you want to change?

SPEAKER_00 37:02

First thing I get rid of is all motivational time standards. Just do away with them.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Wow. Tell me, tell me more about that, because I know some people that like those, Glenn. Some people that listen to this podcast like those.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

I know people like them, but the thing is, is that as a target, we're encouraging kids to focus on speed before they are physically developed. And Rachel and Alex, Alex Fansler, guy that I work with still, he coaches down in um in Indiana. When we were in Cleveland for a short stint, they created a meet called the Star Meet. And the Star Meet stood for shoot, uh, strategy, technique, attitude, and racing. Okay. And the Star Meet had a list of things, and the parents were the timers, only there were no times. Okay. So the strategy was you were given a race strategy before the race and you had to apply that. A technique, you were given one technique point that you had to think about. Attitude was, did you wish the swimmer next to you good luck and congratulate them after the race? And then the race was what place did you get? So there's still racing. So if your goal, if your your strategy was I had to breathe three times on the first length and four on the second, or I had to do this many dolphin kicks or things like that, that was written down on a sheet. And the parent behind the block got to check off whether you did it or not. And so then you had so you have these things that you have to do. You have an assignment in the race, and then you got scored on what place you got in the race. But if you didn't do these things, you got points off. So you had this is like um, what do they call it when the guy in the buggy and the horse harness racing? So it's like you're harness racing, but if you break out into a gallop, you're DQ. And so it's how do I go fast within the confines of proper technique that I know I'll need when I'm in college? I know I will have to have these to have a chance at racing Leon Marshall. Okay? That there's no way in the world I will ever have a prayer of being at that level unless I understand these things, these skills. And so Alex and Rachel developed these meets, and we would run those meets once a week with the kids and their parents, and everybody had a great time and everybody learned. And we can do things like that, but if we focus on someone just getting faster, then we we risk. I mean, I don't mind kids swimming fast. And David Marsh and I had this talk, he loves the thrash sometimes. But then on the other side, I had he and Steve Hoffler on the my Zoom together at the same time. And Steve never allows any of his kids to take a stroke bath. And so I had these two guys going against each other that all have the same goals in mind. What do the kids that work with Steve have to do in order to someday work with David? And that's why I had the two of them on together. And so, yeah, it's like it's like the B finals at NCAAs. Me saying get rid of all of them. Somebody's gonna say that guy's an idiot, but I'm just saying let's try something. Maybe let's not have them for the eight and unders or nine and tens, and maybe they've already switched that. But our focus needs to also be have you learned the skill? This is martial arts we're talking about. And if you got an eight-year-old, you don't say put him in with a black belt and say, you know, go see how you do. Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:19

No, and I I the the the motivational thing, uh, it's funny. When you started that, I was thinking, like, hey, I like motivational times, you know. So I'm partially asking for myself. And then I had to think about the contradiction, Glenn, as you were describing it, because I literally I went for a swim this morning. Uh I swim two or three times a week. Uh it's an applause line when I go out and speak now that I'm 42 years old. I went a lifetime best in the last 12 months, and I don't look at the clock while I practice. I don't look at the clock anymore. I don't. I do these sets, you know, and I just don't look at the clock. And I think what I realized is, you know, it's it's a it can be a curse, the constant measurement of time in our sport because it distracts you. For me, I realized it was distracting me from what I actually wanted to be focused on when I was practicing. And, you know, I would get particularly I think this is an issue for a lot of older swimmers. We're we've been talking a lot about little kids, but I I think this is a barrier for a lot of my colleagues that say, like, oh, I just can't get back in and swim because I get too upset when I look at the times. Well, one of my solutions for you is don't don't look. Don't look. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how fast you're going.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

We're also in a technological uh question now, too, because of form goggles and Fenice had them out for a while. Is that every lap you make a turn, it tells you how fast you went. And so now you know that you make you turn and you realize you went, you know, 17.8 rather than 17.6, the first thing you do is panic and start to pick it up. And it's like rather than focusing on, you know, my underwater needs to be better, you know, what section of that length needs to be better? And that's again where we've put our focus on technology is how many underwater dolphin kicks do you need until you lose velocity? You know, because a lot of people go just for the sake of going far, which is great, but the last three kicks might have only been to waste oxygen. And so, you know, pinpointing these things, you know, I firmly believe that the smarter we make the swimmers, again, Rachel's and my daughter Maddie is in her second year of Mandarin at 12 years old. And I look at her and what she's learning to do from a speaking standpoint. All we have to teach kids, there's two things in swimming, length and tempo. And they get those concepts when they're two years old. And so the length is distance per cycle, how far you push off, how long is the race, that sort of thing. And tempo is is it faster or slower? And that's it. And if we just expand on those things, it's so simple. But by the time they're 13, 14 years old, they're so smart about the sport of swimming.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

Yeah. Yeah. And often we do we we we unfortunately often we fail to make them smart and then we wonder why they're not. You know, we don't teach the thing that we I think on some level grasp that we want them to have. Um, I think the same thing about autonomy. I think everybody wants, you know, athletes that are gonna take some responsibility for themselves. And then I, you know, many of the people uh I'll take a look at their program and I go, okay, so where do athletes get to make a decision for themselves in this program? And it'll be zero. Right. So I'm like, so so there's no actual development given, no, and no, no actual strategy given to develop that capacity with them. I want to switch, I'm gonna get back back to you. We're gonna we're gonna bring things back to you. We're gonna make you uncomfortable for the end of it. Here's a question that I have for other people who, you know, like you're your own, you're your own boss. And I've been on a journey doing that for myself. There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of amazing things about it. I think in general, your your average person who's working a job, you know, seems to romanticize working for yourself, right? They they have this perception of it. Um, the reality is is quite a bit different. I'm not going to get on here and whine, but I'm kind of looking to to well, I might, I might, but not right now. I'm trying to stay focused and positive. I'll be with you. How do you manage yourself? Like with with nobody, with no boss around to tell you what to do, what kind of strategies do you have for getting yourself to just keep moving forward? Because I think that's the most important thing. Like when you when we get to the beginning of this, and you know, Go Swim has been around for 25 years, the number one accomplishment of that is there probably were so many moments when you're go like this is just so frustrating, it's never gonna work. You just want to give up. And you're still in the game. So give me your tips because I want to be in business, you know, 15 years from now. That's when I'll be at 25.

SPEAKER_00 45:05

Iteration. You have to change before the before the everybody else changes. You know, you have to you have to just be aware of the world. It's like in in the late thousands, I had a subscription to Netflix. I hadn't bought a DVD for a year and a half, and I here I am running a DVD business. And it made no sense to me. And so when we started to research, I put out an email that said, Do you want the future of your videos, DVD, download, or streaming? Download was first, DVD was second, streaming was third. And I said, Okay, you get streaming, you know, because I knew the future, there was no DVDs. I don't have anything I can play DVD on now. Download, our sport is, and I don't mean this to be the wrong word, but our sport is very incestuous. We all know each other. We're all friends. If I sold one download to somebody, I guarantee a hundred coaches would have it. And so I'm out of business. And just so everybody knows, we still 25 years later pay our athletes. Dave Denniston has been getting a check every year for 25 years because he was my first guy. And he's on my Zoom next week. So we're still friends. So that's very important to me. So we didn't pay the athletes for the two to four hours that I filmed them. We paid them for the 15 years of work that took to get to their skill. And so we still pay all of our athletes. So all that would have ended with downloads. We would have been out of business for sure. So I had to go streaming because I knew that was the future. We got into sharing videos or coaching services because I knew coaches needed a way to share the videos with their athletes. So we got into that. The data that's taken a while to really catch on is everybody's gonna have data soon. And so what we've done that's a little different than everybody is that we've made it affordable in your pocket. It's not as automated as everybody wants it to be because it can't be. Okay, just go look at the pool. You're not gonna see your swimmer, you're unless you install cameras in the ceiling of every pool, which is what some people are trying to do, the infrastructure change is gonna take so long that technology will pass it. Guaranteed. So I think we're in the right place from that standpoint. But we've tied all the data back into that 25 years of content so that when you get your data, you then get videos that say, here's what you should do to improve your data. So everything that we've built has tied together in the philosophy that what our goal is, is to make swimming a better experience for the people that come in to go swim. And um, and so what keeps me going every day is one, how do we iterate what's next? Wayne Goldsmith and I did a podcast about technique, and we said, what you know, what did I learn from swimming 40 years ago to now? And now we can't look at today to teach today. We have to look at 10 years from now. Who's gonna be the innovator that teaches what's after Leon, what's after, you know, Kate Douglas, what is the next thing out there? And um, it was having Aaron Pearsall watch Hughie costs his 200 back when we realized that the 15-meter mark is not the rule, it's the limitation, because he hit it almost every time. And so had he been able to go beyond that, he would have. But now, if everybody's not training with that in mind, then you're not training for the future, you're training for today. And you're just hoping the person next to you didn't train for the future. And so everything you're always just thinking about where do I want to be and how can I help someone five years from now? But how can I help them with the technology we have today or the the services we have today? And that's why I don't post as much drills on Instagram because there's 5,000 people posting a drill every day. So why do they need mine? You know, there's plenty of that out there. So we, you know, we just kind of go another route. So you're just always looking for and what makes me happy. And I've I've learned later in my life that the thing that really makes me happy is people smiling. And if I can make somebody smile because they've done a best time or they've done a better push off or something like that, that's that's really all I care about because that that means we've done our job.

SPEAKER_01 49:10

You know, Go Swim itself is such a great resource, and we've been talking a lot about that. Where do you go outside? Like, what are your go-to places where you go to learn, to improve, to gain knowledge? I find myself asking this question of all the people. I bring a lot of people on here, and I think one of the things they have in common is they're just like lifelong love of learning people, and I know you're one of those people. And it's just I also recognize that the circumstances, the the reality of the world we're living in right now is that there's never been more places to get information. And so a lot of them are shit. Like a lot of them are really bad. So I always want to ask other people, you know, how they filter through, where they go, um, and how they, you know, how they approach learning in that environment.

SPEAKER_00 50:02

I I think a lot of for me, obviously it's I still do a ton of filming, a ton of filming. And so every time I video somebody, I learn something from it. In working with all the we have about 30, hopefully after CSCAA, maybe 50 college teams using the platform. And so seeing what they're doing, seeing a lot of college swimming, you know, what's the next step, and then deconstructing that. The the things that I see that, you know, Rachel had three guys, 41 and under on the relay in the in the 100 free. I mean, seeing a guy go 40 point that I watch swim every day is like, what does he do every day to go 40 point on the relay? And it's the skinniest guy in the world. So it's like, what does he do? And he can instruct that, and how do I teach that to somebody else? So it's not how do you go 40.8 or 40.9 on the on the free relay. It's it's what does Cade know? What does he experience? What does he feel? And what is his body position, his struggle length, and all that sort of thing, and deconstruct that into how I can teach that to a 10, 11, or 12-year-old. So simplifying the message back. So it's so much observation. And it's not necessarily observation about how somebody else teaches, but it's what is the end result and how did they get there? Um, so it's I think you you start looking at the sport differently when all you do is watch with with an inquisitive eye rather than wow, did you see how fast he went? It's it's wow, how did he go that fast? And so you just kind of change in it. And and again, it's it's making sure that the things that I do say publicly aren't that stupid that I get called out, that it's just close enough to reality. And so it's it's still that scared. But I go every week, I'm on a Zoom meeting, and you know, and like I said, I got some pretty good people coming on. And we do Zooms instead of podcasts because anybody can come in and ask questions of these people. And so I do it. It's important for you to do it live.

SPEAKER_01 52:02

Yeah, I get gather that.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Yeah. So, and and again, that's just part of it because we don't know what questions we'll get. And you know, one of the best questions I got in the entire time really got me rethinking breaststroke, was from a guy who's a professor at MIT, who's a master swimmer. And I've gotten to know him really well. And when he comes to town, he's got family close to us. We have coffee together, and he's like the smartest guy I've ever talked to, and he's just a fan of swimming when he's not lecturing at MIT. And it's crazy to me how he looks at me as an expert. And I'm just like, you're it just doesn't fit. This doesn't fit, you know, but is he's a great guy. And so yeah, it's just staying active in the sport. I'm I'm gonna start in the next week actually volunteering on deck for the club team here at at Northwestern. And so I'll just go ask Valestio, where do you want me? Put me with any group. Because the coaches know me by now that they're not they don't think I'm gonna come in and take over. They know that I'm just there as one of them. Um, because that's always a fear because I've been around for so long. People will think I'll walk in and just try to take over. And I'm not like that at all. I just I'm always just so more much more inquisitive than anything else. So Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:24

I think people who know you, who've who've who've actually met you though, know that you're not gonna be that way. It's just it's just not it's not constitutionally who you are. And I I like that you brought up the zooms. I really want to come on. I I actually got the inspiration, latest inspiration, because I was watching one of your Zooms and and like I just loved what you guys were talking about. But I also think it brings me back to a point that I maybe have not made in terms of asking this question with anybody else, because I I ask about filtering for information. The point you make about live, about doing it live, I think is so important. One of the scenarios I find myself in that I actually really relish, I I have a speaking engagement coming up next week, and they were saying, like, you know, is it okay? You know, you're gonna prepare some material, but it might be a small group, and you know, is it okay if people just throw situations and scenarios at you that you, you know, won't know ahead of time and you have to respond to them? I go, not only is it okay, I'm so excited to do it. Right. Like that's like I'm a that's my life. But I think to me, that's a tell, right? Because if you weren't uh providing good good information, if you didn't have some confidence in what you're doing, and there wasn't depth, by the way, to like beyond that surface level, you know, let me just share a drill on social media, that live aspect wouldn't work at all. Like it just it would fall flat on its face immediately because the first question would come in that people would get a non-answer or just a complete nonsense of an answer. Right. Right. Yeah. And and that would be that. And I so I think that's to me, I think that's instructive for my audience. Like, look for people who can respond in dynamic environments, right? And not just kind of a scripted put-together thing. I I really like it.

SPEAKER_00 55:21

And I learned from them too, because what I have learned with age comes some wisdom in that if I don't know the answer, I don't just yell out something. I go, let's talk about this, let's discuss this, or I'll call on somebody else in the Zoom and say, you know, let me get your opinion first so you can look bad and then I can correct you. No, I don't do it like that. But it's, you know, but it really is, it really is being on the spot. But then you have to know that this is going to be recorded, it's gonna be out there. And so if you just blurt out your first instinct, it might be wrong. So if you don't know it, don't be ashamed to say, I don't know it. That's a great question. Let's talk about this. And that's because you have to protect, you know, your reputation and making sure that the bad stuff doesn't get out there that you might be crazy about and, you know, think of something. And I'm not saying I don't have those things, but but I, you know, who who asks the question also comes into it. The same question can be asked by a 70-year-old master's former and a coach of a 12-year-old, and the answer is going to be totally different. And that's that's where the live thing is so cool because you're talking to a real person out there. It's not somebody texting you on the internet or on through Instagram or something saying, I worked really hard, why aren't I faster? How do I know how hard you work? I don't know anything about you. Context. But I get those questions. I get those questions a lot. You know, I work really hard, why aren't I faster? I'm like, I have no idea. I'm glad I don't get those messages.

SPEAKER_01 56:51

I'm I'm not goodness. I'm not I don't want to get to that level. Maybe I'll stay where I am. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:58

In terms of this.

SPEAKER_01 56:59

Glenn, we're gonna we're gonna bring it to a close. You know, for people who've been listening to this, where do you want to send them? What are some different ways they can engage with some of the stuff that that you've been talking about? The Zoom, Go Swim in general.

SPEAKER_00 57:11

Well, I'll can I provide you with a link for the Zoom sign up for them. Okay, there's a newsletter specifically for the Zoom. It's not the regular Go Swim newsletter. It only has like 5,000 people on it. And so only just for Zoom meetings? Yeah. I mean, the other one's massive. It's ridiculous. But the one and it's only for people that have attended already, okay, in the six years. And so I don't harvest from anything else. So if you've come to a Zoom, then you're on that list. But I will share that with you. So if people want to get on that one, because next week's is going to be really cool. It's about the transition. Again, I'm t I I don't want to get away from technique, but this just kind of came up. It's about an animated film that one of my old swimmers did who has been drawing for The Simpsons for the last 25 years. And I had I did post it. It's about the transition of athletic to real world afterwards. And so it's that that transition of life. And so I thought, who else could I get on that could really talk to us about that? And it's Dave Deniston, who obviously has one of the best stories about what happened after swimming. And then the other guy we're really, really honored and blessed to be friends with is Greg Luganis, who can talk about his journey past. And so, and so anybody's welcome to come on and sign up for that newsletter. I'll make a couple more announcements through that newsletter. And then anything else, just the regular Go Swim channel. Talk to your teams about Go Swim because it's better if everybody's in. The parents film, the parents, and you know, everybody gets it, the coaches, the parents, the swimmers, everybody's connected. And it's better if the team is in, and I'll do, I'll personally do a Zoom meeting with your team or with your coaches and show them exactly how it works. And it is video sharing as well as all the performance data you could ever imagine. And this is where we're pushing the performance data is into the AI reporting. But we have two things for AI. One, responsible AI, which means kids never get to talk to the AI. It's just a report. And two, human in the middle, which means that there will always be a human between the data and the athletes. So we're very careful about that. Um but yeah, so just go swim.tv and I'll share those uh couple links to you. Yeah, we're here. Pretty easy to find most of the time.

SPEAKER_01 59:26

So you'll be able to find those in the notes of this podcast. If people want to reach me, Crdesantis at gmail.com. You can just go straight into my inbox. You can reach out to me on Instagram, Christy underscore coach. And or you can go to my website, Christycoach.com. I have a contact form. You can uh send me your information there as well. Glenn thank you so much for being willing to do this and being willing to take this conversation every direction that I wanted to take it. And thank you to everybody for listening, and I'll be back with you guys again in a week. Thanks, Chris.