00:00:03 - Introduction
This is the Your Sports Resource podcast, where each week you'll learn actionable strategies that you can implement so the operations of your club support your coaching staff and the direction of your organization. We are committed to excellence in youth sports leadership. Let's get started.
00:00:30 - Matt Bos
Welcome to the Your Sports Resource podcast. I am your host, Matt Bos. And today I have coach Mike Murray from the Victor Swim Club up in New York joining me. I'm super excited to have coach on the show today. Coach Murray is the program director and CEO of the Victor Swim Club since 2019 after heading the Islanders Aquatic Club for two seasons as the head coach there.
00:00:57
Throughout the 2021 season, Coach Murray was instrumental in guiding Victor Swim Club through and navigating that global coronavirus, which really hampered a lot of teams. Victor was consistently participating in both practices and competitions. And throughout the 2022 -23 season, they had a super successful year as a regional and had some regional and national level swims.
00:01:28
It led to the team winning the Niagara LSC Long Course Team Championship and placing several athletes in the top 25 at Zones, Sectionals, Futures, Junior Nationals, Tier Pros, Pro Series meets, and Open Water National events. So coming off of that, they've just built on a ton of success. Coach Murray travels worldwide to help coaches and grow the sport of swimming and to help coaches professionally, you know, kind of grow and develop their teams.
00:02:00
Over his career, Coach Murray has been instrumental in developing nationally recognized USA swimming clubs. But during the time he's also developed a lot of national team members, international medalists, USA national swimming championship finalists, and open water swimmers. He's worked in all aspects, all levels of the sport. Victor has represented, as a club team, they have represented, had athlete to represent them in just numerous championship events.
00:02:32
And, and over the past eight years, he's put swimmers at all levels of NCAA swimming. He's also heavy, heavily involved with the American Swim Coaches Association as the current president. Honestly coach after just reading the bio and everything I'm exhausted from it. So, how do you balance all of this? How do you balance running a very successful club team? And then your duties with Aska and you're traveling and going around and talking about swimming.
00:03:10 - Mike Murray
Well, Matt, first and foremost, thank you so much to you and Renata and Your Sports Resource. You guys have been fantastic in our space, in our swimming community space, and in all youth sports organizations. So we thank you for your work. But to answer your question, you know, that bio makes me sound a lot better than I actually am. I have a really great team around me, a great support system in our board of directors in my coaching staff, and obviously in my family. So to answer the short aspect of the question, I don't handle it great all the time, but I like to think that I'm always learning and finding ways to get better.
00:03:55 - Matt Bos
Yeah, it's great to have a good team behind you, but there's a lot that goes in that as far as from your side of that and it's something I want to touch on. But the first thing I was thinking, you work for a board-run organization as do a lot of the club teams that we deal with here at your sports resource. And oftentimes for us, when we go in there's a disconnect between the board and the coaching staff.
00:04:21
And we're usually brought in to kind of bridge that gap to kind of get everybody on the same page. And you find when that works well, teams have a lot of success and your teams had a lot of success. So what are some of the things that you've done to build those relationships with your board members to ensure that they're supporting the coaching staff into what your direction and what your goals are?
00:04:43 - Mike Murray
Yeah, that's a great question, Matt. My first four years at Victor Swim Club when they initially hired me, I had six presidents of the team in four years. And so at the end of that four years, I had said, we're either going to switch to a coach-run organization or I'm going to look other places. And at the time they weren't ready to do that.
00:05:05
So I left for two years and about, I was at the World University Games in Naples, Italy, and I got a phone call from Victor saying, what would it take to get you back? And I said it would take a really good board that's going to be made up of the same people year after year who I can trust. And they made that happen. So I was able to come home and, I had so much passion for Victor that it was an easy decision.
00:05:33
I loved our situation in Long Island. We had a great team, a great club owner down there. But my heart was really here in Victor. And so, since that time, that was late 2019, I've had the same club president, the same vice president, and the same treasurer, all of whom have had their kids come and go through our program. But have understood the necessity for consistency, industry knowledge, the rhythm of our sport. And they have given back tirelessly to our team and I couldn't be more fortunate to have that group behind me.
00:06:15 - Matt Bos
Yeah. Yeah. And so if you have, say a board member who's, who is leaving, do you play a role then in helping now to kind of find that new person? Cause I think that's one of the things I think people where we see is that it's well, you know, so and so wanted to volunteer and we needed somebody and then they don't have the skills necessarily to fulfill the role, which they've been put in.
00:06:37
And one of the things that we stress with coaches a lot is you gotta, you have to take an active role and kind of helping seek out the right people. So I see your I feel like you're agreeing there. So it's like, how do you involve yourself with that? And what advice could you maybe give to other coaches as far as you know, when you have some board openings, what they should be doing?
00:06:57 - Mike Murray
Yeah, well, our club president, Karen Senglaub, has always given me a lot of autonomy to make some decisions and then looked at their role as supporting the vision that I had for the club. So I think in my first four years before this current board, they wouldn't have trusted me to recruit or mentor, or suggest new board members.
00:07:19
But what Karen and I did was work collaboratively to come up with an idea to engage people in our community who are number one, familiar with youth sports at some level, number two, had an active interest in our team and our space and our community, and number three, maybe had ties to our club in the past or will have ties as future parents on our team.
00:07:43
So what we were able to do is engage the master swimming community locally, where we found not only a former Olympian but an Olympic gold medalist in rowing, Chris Thorsness. She won an Olympic gold medal in the women's eight in Los Angeles. She is now on our board. So we have an Olympic gold medalist on our board who happened to be on the local masters' team.
00:08:07
We have a local sports diet and nutritionist who participated on the Victor Swim Club as an age-group swimmer who had who saw a lot of value in what we were doing. We have a local person who owns and operates the Masters team and is familiar with youth sports and swam on a different club team locally and swam at a very high level in college.
00:08:30
So we were able to recruit, mentor, and onboard that new trio this year of board members because of the fact that my current board had enough trust in me to say, here's a slate of people that I think are really valuable. Let me know what you think. And they came right back to me and were super supportive. And now these three are playing an active role, not only in board discussions, but they're able to take their enterprises and put it directly into our team.
00:09:01
So for example, Chris Thorsness, she's an attorney. We're able to lean into her on a lot of decisions that we make as an organization. Brandon, who owns a local company, we utilize his context for advertising and other revenue sources and Christina routinely gives presentations to our athletes and families on nutrition and diet. So in my mind, we hit the lottery just being really creative with the community that we're in.
00:09:29 - Matt Bos
Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I mean, and that's where we try to get where it's, you have to have someone to, to fit that role. And I mean, if they have a swimming background, that's fantastic. Right. And it kind of, it does help, but there are so many other avenues you can go down. I mean, the example of the rower and, and the crazy part of that is, I mean, rowing and swimming. Although, you know, yes, they're water-related, but there's so many similarities still, as far as rowers know what swimmers go through as far as training. It's a very aerobic sport. They put in long hours.
00:09:59
It's when I coached in New Zealand, we'd go, I'd leave to go to practice in the morning and, you the swimmers, we were getting in the pool, and across the street was the river and the rowers were getting the boats out and they were going at the same time. And it was just one of those things that you, nobody else was up in town, but you know, the swimmers and the rowers. So they have that background and understanding.
00:10:19
And, and then I think that's an awesome connection that you've made there where their community members, they have. They open up so many other doors as far as bringing them into it for your club as having them being involved. And, and that's one of the things that I think a lot of clubs that we're hoping we can kind of get the cross to them is that sometimes it's a bylaw thing.
00:10:43
Sometimes they need to go in and change those, and that's something that is doable where it could be a non-member, or your board because oftentimes it serves your club better. And it seems like you all have been able to navigate that and obviously are having a super amount of success with that. So that's awesome. So kind of to go back to earlier, you mentioned about having a great staff.
00:11:06
One of the other things we really push with the head coaches that we work with, or CEOs, executive directors, whoever is leading up that coaching staff is the professional development. How are you developing yourself continually, but also how are you developing your staff? So what are some of the ways that you have found that have been helpful to develop your staff to make sure that you have the best qualified people on deck to work with your athletes?
00:11:33 - Mike Murray
That's a great question, Matt. And I feel like we are always learning from each other, certainly in the higher levels of our team, but also those great coaches we have working with our 12 and unders and our 10 and unders and our eight and unders in our lesson program. But I've been very fortunate to be able to leverage some of the relationships I have with the American Swim Coaches Association and with Fitter and Faster to engage our staff.
00:12:00
So for example, our associate head coach, Dan Burke, he swam for us as an athlete. So he had a lot of knowledge about our team. He won the Jean Freeman NCAA Coach of the Year award for young coaches when he was coaching college at Wabash in Indiana. And what we've been able to do is plug him into some internship opportunities with Fitter and Faster, where he helps us develop our podcast and our show, Coaches Corner.
00:12:28
We've leaned into our senior-level coach, Scott Wisner, who was a Big 10 champion for Iowa back in the seventies and worked for Jack Nelson down at Swim Fort Lauderdale for a really long time. So we're constantly learning from him. Amy Wisner, his wife, who's been a long-time age group coach. We're always trying to share ideas and what's really unique, I think about swimming and a lot of youth sports organizations are we're able to collaborate as a staff on an athlete from the time that they come into our program at eight, and by the time they leave our program at 24, 25, whenever they graduate college.
00:13:08
And being a part of that journey is certainly something that's really special. I think we're very lucky to have that, but it's a learning process all the way through. And a lot of times, Matt, what we learn is maybe I'm not the best person to work with an individual athlete, or maybe an individual athlete in their groups needs to come to me.
00:13:29
So, that I think is the most expansive learning when we're able to kind of take our expert hat off for a minute and say, you might know what better to do here than I do. And that fosters such a culture of respect. This is a group that's been with me since I initially started at Victor back in 2012. So it feels like family.
00:13:53 - Matt Bos
Yeah, yeah. So for young coaches, say, or coaches, say, if there's a head coach, and they've got young coaches coming into their program, what are some of the things that you think that they could be doing with a young coach?
00:14:09
And I guess what I'm trying to get at here is not necessarily even just the swimming part of it, but the communications, how to deal with athletes, how to deal with parents, because that's one of the things that I have felt as a coach, depending on your background, I mean, some people have gone through maybe a teacher education program and they've gotten those skills, but as a coach, there's not necessarily a training program that you go through that you learn those things.
00:14:37
And some of the times I think that young coaches particularly, you don't know how to, you're younger than the parents sometimes and you don't know how to communicate with them. So are there things that you could suggest to say another coach who's got a young staff and they're struggling to develop them.
Mike Murray (14:27.847)
Yeah, I think first and foremost, Matt, just a shameless plug for the American Swim Coaches Association, our level one course, which is called Principles for Success, really gives them a lot of baseline information that they can read and digest. And it's great in that platform. But you and I both know that the learning that happens at that level happens between one-on-one interaction.
00:15:18
So we have a program at Victor Swim Club that scares all of the first-year coaches in our program and it's called Coffee with the Coach. And what it is, is you have to make yourself available for two hours a week, whether it's maybe one hour Wednesday morning, one hour Friday morning, for the parents of the athletes in your group. And those parents will schedule, I promise you, they will schedule a meeting with you throughout the course of the year.
00:15:45
And our goal is to get through all the parents in the group. So, those first couple meetings, I think our coaches are very quiet. But as they start to get a little bit more experience in dealing with that interaction and supporting the goals and values of our team and the vision of our team inside of what they can provide uniquely for that family's athletes, that's where the big learning curve takes place. So I think as a head coach, you can't be afraid to let your assistants, no matter how young, no matter how new, fly in their own a little bit.
00:16:17
There'll be a couple of Icarus moments where they get a little too close to the sun, they get burned. Right, we've all been through that. But that's part of the process, right? You have to cut the cord, I think, almost immediately this day and age. Parents are evolving as fast or even faster than the athletes. So the more you make yourself available to this generation of parents, I think the more likely it is for them to have total buy-in with what you're doing. And the same thing goes for your coaches.
00:16:47 - Matt Bos
Yeah, I love the fact that what you just touched on because it seems, one of those conversations sometimes that people, I think they shy away from that, the kids are, they're a little bit different now than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Cause you know, I know that one. I know what my experience was at least growing up in club and high school and then collegiate swimming.
00:17:08
I know how my parents were. I know how my kids are. I know how I am as a parent. I mean, I try to kind of, you know, stay a little bit of it in the in-between, but I think it is worth talking about that. There's just a lot more available knowledge. There's, youth sport in general, not just in swimming has become in some ways, I don't want to say a big business, but it has become a big business for youth athletics.
00:17:31
I mean, you can't get through any sport now without, you there being some club team and you're getting fully involved in a year-round and something's kind of always been that way a little bit. But I think we're kind of catching up now to understand that we've got to educate the parents.
00:17:44
And that's one of the conversations a lot of times with coaches that we have is the more you're out front, the more you're putting the information out there, the more you're meeting the parents, the less headaches you have, I guess, is the only way to really term it when they have questions and then you feel like you're, maybe they're not understanding where you're coming from.
00:18:08
And it's like, well, just spend the time to meet with them and kind of meet them where they're at. And, you know, life goes a whole lot easier for you then. So yeah, I appreciate that. And I think that's a really cool program that you have for your coaches. And at some point, they'll realize, hopefully, it's sooner rather than later, once they get started that like, that was the best thing for them. And the skills they learn from that are going to be super useful if they keep coaching or decide to go another path. So that's, that's great education.
00:18:34 - Mike Murray
Yeah, I think Matt, I think it also removes a lot of the emotion that can come later on from conflicts that will happen. You know, that's important, I think, for coaches to understand is you're going to have parent conflict. It's part of the business. It's part of the process. The sooner you learn to remove the emotion out of it and let go of your ego of holding on to whatever it is you think you need to hold on to and just listen, even if they're going to still be angry with you, if you've listened and you've learned from that. You know, it's easy to move on from a family if you have to, but I think the harder challenge is to kind of embrace that struggle and see if you can get to a point of collaboration. And to do that at 22, 23, 24 years old is not comfortable, but I think it's required.
00:19:21 - Matt Bos
Yeah, yeah. So from a developmental standpoint, as far as you are involved with so many things, how do you structure your time? How do you make sure that you are taking care of your responsibilities as the head coach? And then obviously you have staff that report to you that you're the ask a president, you're traveling, doing lots of talks. So from a time standpoint, a day-to-day, week-to-week, how are you able to manage all of this?
00:19:54 - Mike Murray
It's really crazy. So between Google Calendar and our club president who really helps keep me on track, I have a lot of help. The day starts at about 5 and it ends every night at about 9. And you really have to embrace this part of it. And it's probably the question I get asked most is everywhere I go is how do you do it all?
00:20:22
I love it. The short answer is I love it. There's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of sacrifice. And now as I get older, I'm trying to learn how to say no more often. And that's a real challenge because I'm needed personally in my life for others. We have five kids, Nikki and I, so it's really busy. Thankfully, the older three are out on their own now, doing really well but we have a nine and 11 year old and that takes a lot of time too.
00:20:56
And I've learned from the older three that I probably need to spend a little bit more time home than I do on the road and doing other things. So we are actively right now starting to engage that phase of my professional life and starting to let our coaches, especially Dan, who's our associate head coach, start to take over more of those day-to-day operational things that I've been doing for a long time.
00:21:22 - Matt Bos
Yeah, the family, you know, and I think that's one of the aspects I think you hear, or I at least have heard, you know, kind of one of those general themes of, you know, having the family life and you get into coaching. And that was one of the things that I always had pushback on where it's the same in any profession, right?
00:21:40
If you are truly passionate about what you do and you're going to spend a lot, you're going to spend a lot of time and you're going to get involved in a lot of other ways that, you know, the ordinary person's not going to but you find a way to make it all work. And it is a lot of organization. So I love to hear that. And one of the other things that I think, you know, for us to stress with coaches is that you've got to be a planner, right? It's not just planning your training.
00:22:03
It's not just planning the, you know, the training blocks, the training for a week. It's planning your, you know, your day out, making sure that you have a routine that settles in, that you can learn to kind of manage what you have to do, manage your personal life, and then manage how to keep developing yourself and whether that's going out talking to other coaches, reading books, whatever, there's so many ways now to do it.
00:22:26
So I'm glad to hear that. It's a good message, I believe, that you're involved with so much. You're married, you have five kids and everything's working out fantastic. So I think that probably gives a lot of people hope like, okay, I can do this, right? I can have this balance. So, as we move into the springtime of 2024, what are the next four, five, six months look like for you and your swim club?
00:22:55 - Mike Murray
Yeah, that's great question man. We were just planning that this morning. Just sending him. In fact, I honestly wasn't even thinking about this before we jumped on today, but I sent a message to our board about 2025 minutes ago, just detailing. Hey, listen, right now the coaching staff is going to be really engaged in a number of different things.
00:23:19
Getting these athletes ready for not only our LSC championship, but some of the national meets coming up. And then, we have three who are right on the cusp of making their first Olympic trial cut. So there's a lot of energy and effort that goes into that. So I sent an email to our board and I said, hey, listen, if it's t-shirt orders or having this extra meeting over the next four weeks, we're not gonna be able to do it.
00:23:47
And I think that as a coach, you have to be able to say to your staff, to your board, to your parents, like, you've enjoyed a lot of our time throughout the course of the year, but now, and it's for your kids, it's for your athletes, now we have to really stay focused. And that was not always easy for me. I used to try to make it all work.
00:24:09
But that's what the next couple of weeks looks like. We have a couple championship meets locally, and then regionally, nationally. And then right at the middle of May, end of May, we're going to be trying to make a couple Olympic trial cuts.
00:24:26 - Matt Bos
Well, that's fantastic, coach. Best of luck with everything coming up. I super appreciate you joining me today. And honestly, thanks for all that you do for the swimming industry. I mean, people like you are what keep driving this and why we keep continuing to thrive as a swimming community. And I appreciate you and your busy schedule carving out this bit of time to talk to us today. Um, you know, so best of luck to you and everything moving forward with, with your club team for sure.
00:24:59 - Mike Murray
Thanks so much. And again, the work that you guys are doing is so critical in our space. And I know that you know, on behalf of ASCA, we so appreciate you all as a partner, and we're looking forward to continued work and collaborating moving forward.
00:25:14 - Matt Bos
Thanks, coach. So thank you for listening. Please subscribe, rate, review the podcast so we can reach a larger audience. And don't forget to visit our website, yoursportsresource.com, where you can find articles and tools, and more information that will hopefully help you directly with your club. Thanks for listening.
