Seeing as how this was my first year as AEC President, I was very busy getting used to my new position. Since I am not the only athlete in a new position, my first task was to do some rearranging of athletes on various committees. I feel it is important that we have more athletes on fewer committees to increase involvement and distribute the work. For committees that require the athlete reps to be retired, I found it challenging to find reps who were not already sitting on several other committees. It concerns me that some of our retired athletes are not staying involved in the sport. This is clearly a target area that will help us reach our goal of increasing participation.

I asked our reps to distribute a survey at the zone meets and at Collegiate Nationals to get an idea of the involvement we can expect from current athletes after they retire. While many said that they would give back (ie. coaching, judging, and doing masters) I was surprised to see that several said that they would not simply because they did not know enough to be a coach or a judge. Perhaps we need to look into more ways of marketing CCP courses and judges training to our older swimmers (college and even high school) especially since we lose swimmers at such an early age.

I hope that this year, we as athletes can put our heads together to come up with ways to encourage retired athletes to stay involved. Yes, it is a big time commitment, but the more people we have the less work each of us has to do!

Respectfully submitted,

Anna Eng