Steve Locke is the former, 12-year, executive director of USA Triathlon, and now sits on its board of directors. From Steve: "I write this as a USA Triathlon member and not as a USA Triathlon Board of Directors member. The following is my opinion and does not necessarily represent the overall perspective of the USA Triathlon Board of Directors."

For the past several weeks, many of us have read and listened to reasons some feel that USA Triathlon should end its relationship with the USOC. The thoughts have been interesting, and the exercise has been perhaps helpful in the sense of examining what has been a very meaningful partnership between the two organizations. Much of the discussion has been focused on a narrow band of concerns. The full breadth of the relationship has not been examined to see exactly how intertwined the growth of triathlon is with programs USOC and our elite athletes have brought to the table. I would like to briefly look at two of those programs of growth, and also take a brief look at a potential compliance requirement which may be implemented to maintain membership within the USOC.

If you are a marketer, and you want to grow a sport, you realize that the USA Triathlon name and/or brand (or, for that matter, any other sport organization's name) will not be the driver. Our organization will only be the place from where our "marketing" people, the "heroes" of the sport, will come. Our job is to create the heroes of the sport; to develop role models; to get those heroes onto the front pages of the mainstream press; to have a presence with the great unacquainted; and to impact young people and others with a desire to do what Susan Williams, Barbara Lindquist, Shelia Taormina and Hunter Kemper have done. We have been hugely successful in the delivery of Olympic heroes. We are fortunate.

Our sport is contemporary, it is athletic, and it has intelligent, articulate, engaging people involved in our elite ranks. From the perspective of attracting new people to the sport, USA Triathlon is not important to a potential new member... but Susan, Barb, Shelia and Hunter are. Our elite athletes are our prinicipal marketing mechanism, and we get that marketing at a very economical price. It is a part of the USA Triathlon mission to build the sport, and we must use the people of the sport with cache to help fulfill that portion of the mission. Throughout, USOC has provided the majority of the resources for us to support our heroes.

As our involvement with the USOC deepened a number of years ago, the USOC counseled us to develop and than enhance a program for coaches. We have done that. Our coaching certification program as devised by our coaching committee has struck gold. Without a doubt, it is the most popular program within the USA Triathlon menu of opportunity. All courses fill almost within the hour of posting. The ongoing result of the coaching certification program is that well over 1,000 coaches have been certified in our country. These coaches have been trained to provide a consistency in coaching with an ethical approach. Through their efforts, literally thousands of their clients have been brought into multisport... not to do just one race, but most often to become involved in racing on a regular basis, and to participate in a new healthy lifestyle.

The ongoing growth of clients within each coach's base has frequently spawned the creation of new clubs. Within USA Triathlon, club growth has been spectacular. Club growth and the growth of members brought into multisport by coaches has been a major contributor to the upward spike in membership applications. USA Triathlon's membership growth is very similar to the growth in youth swimming that took place years ago. Smart people from swimming used the "development of coaches" tactic and US Swimming was and still continues to be the beneficiary of that approach today. Without USA Triathlon's USOC partnership, the triathlon coaching initiative would likely never have taken place (especially since the USOC underwrote the initial costs involved to get it up and running).

If one takes a look at the USA Triathlon membership growth, it is very evident that the major growth spurt started during the Sydney Olympic time frame (our first participation in an Olympic Games), and still continues today.

During the upheaval regarding the governance and management of the USOC that took place a couple of years ago, a great deal of self examination took place within the USOC organization. Experts were brought in and a needy transformation started to take place. The transformation was painful as many "stakeholders" felt left out. "Stakeholders", such as each NGB, used to have a Board member as did many other sports organizations on the USOC's Board of Directors. That Board swelled to 123 members, and became a Board that was largely conflicted as each member wanted a piece of the pie for their own sports organization, and was without a doubt inbred.

"Inbreeding" creates weakness within an organization. Witness that any animal or plant species with a limited gene pool becomes weaker over time and may eventually disappear. The similarity in goverance is strikingly the same. If a sport's governance is "purebred" within the sport, it tends to weaken as little fresh thought is introduced from the outside, and the business side frequently does not flourish. This has been evidenced time and again within NGB governance. The model is just wrong for these times of a needed higher grade of business sophistication.

The United States Congress in its review of the USOC's governance found that USOC was fraught with conflicts and was not receiving independent input to help apply cutting edge approaches to the business side. As a result, a more constituency based representation model was created with the addition of several independent Board members (generally people not associated with sport, but rather involved with business). The Board size was also downsized to a more workable number. The Congress also felt that this model was appropriate for the USOC member NGBs.

The USOC was mandated by the Congress to help develop the NGBs into more formidable business operations. While this process will likely be as painful as the USOC metamorphosis, in the end, it will create, across the board, NGBs which are more stable from a governance, management and financial standpoint. It is a "hybrid" model meant to bring strength through multiple layers of expertise in sport, governance and business operations.

The Olympic association with our sport has brought our sport legitimacy as an authentic sport; it has brought to triathlon the privilege of selecting individuals to represent the United States on the Olympic stage; and it has taken our sport out of a provincial limited stake in the sports universe to an opportunity to extend to men, women and children across all walks of life a real opportunity to improve themselves through the unique change in life style that triathlon provides.