Kevin Ring Guiding USA Swimming Into New Era With LA Olympics on the Horizon
A protracted search led USA Swimming to hiring Kevin Ring as the organization’s new Chief Executive Officer. Ring officially took over September 17 after a career working in marketing and corporate sponsorships, most recently with the Professional Golfers Association of America and Legends Golf, but never in swimming. His first days and weeks on the job were spent determining how to best support the organization’s goals and the staff already in place.
As he acclimated, Ring solicited feedback from around the sport. His role would start at the grassroots level, helping clubs find solutions to boost membership and retention, aiding local swim committees in setting up their initiatives and providing support to swimmers on the elite level.
It will not be Ring’s job to change big-meet performance. Greg Meehan was hired four months before Ring as director of the U.S. National Team, and Ring endorsed Meehan’s vision for that group, promising to do anything within reason to back the team aiming for success at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
“Leaning into what we can really be doing to support our membership, what we can really be doing to ensure have intentional growth,” Ring told Swimming World about his immediate priorities with USA Swimming. “Make sure that we’re supporting our clubs because the clubs are obviously the lifeblood of our sport. How we can work with the LSCs more effectively to really hit our overall goals? What we can do to really support the national team and the athletes is to make sure that they have all the tools that they need?”
Jake Grosser, a longtime USA Swimming staff member recently promoted to Chief Operating Officer, called Ring’s arrival “this great breath of fresh air, and it allowed us to leverage his experience that he brought from outside the sport, combine that with some of the expertise in the sport, and really start aligning on what a consistent, shared vision of success for the organization means.”
Supporting Clubs and Communities
Central to USA Swimming’s mission is guiding the sport to expand and flourish. The results that show up in Olympic medal tallies begin years and even decades earlier when swimmers sign up for local swim clubs and even learn-to-swim programs. Ring believes that the organization should create pathways that reach out to individuals across the athletic spectrum to become part of the sport in some way.
“I’m not hoping that everybody is going to become a swimmer, but obviously we want everybody to learn to swim,” Ring said. Depending on one’s background, success in swimming could be putting their head underwater for the first time, the first competitive race, winning a medal at a local meet or trying out and making a high school swim team. “Just really working with all of these to make sure we’re creating that path to become a swimmer and have this become a lifetime sport.”
Thousands of clubs around the country fall under the USA Swimming banner, ranging from behemoth teams with numerous pools and hundreds of swimmers to newly formed clubs looking for any water time. For the organization to assist those clubs from headquarters, it hopes for open communication and transparency, which Groesser admitted is “something that honestly hasn’t always been there.”
Each club faces unique challenges, but a common refrain throughout the country is striving to stay relevant for families compared to other potential sports interests, in activities that require less specialized facilities or less time commitment. Club swim meets often cover multiple sessions of several hours each over many days, so USA Swimming is promoting its Block Party initiative as a competitive starting point for smaller teams.
“It’s quick; you can do it on a weeknight, in two hours,” Grosser said. “You can do it with less officials. But then it also offers just overall flexibility for the club to get creative with their own team, with their own community and the needs that they have, and it allows them to offer a product specific to their club, specific to their community, that helps kind of be competitive in the youth sports landscape.”
Ring repeatedly emphasized the term “intentional growth,” prioritizing resources in communities that can manage expanded interest in the sport. “We shouldn’t just grow for the sake of growing. We should be growing in the best interest of the sport, the communities we want to grow in,” Ring said. “I keep going back to water. We can’t create a huge interest in swimming if people have no place to actually go swim.”
Leading the National Team to Los Angeles
The most visible sign of trouble within USA Swimming in recent years has been performance at international competitions. The 2023 World Championships marked the first time in two decades that the U.S. team did not win the gold-medal count at a major meet. One year later at the Paris Olympics, it took until the final race of the meet for the Americans to surpass Australia with eight gold medals. The struggles were especially pronounced on the men’s side; after many quads of dominant performances from Michael Phelps and Caeleb Dressel, the group accounted for only six individual medals and one gold in Paris.
USA Swimming National Team Director Greg Meehan — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
Since Meehan accepted the job guiding the U.S. National Team last spring, he began implementing his ideas and making changes. Ring is tasked with providing resources to make that happen.
“I don’t know what Greg knows. I can bring an organizational structure. I can bring a business mind,” he said. “So my conversation with Greg was really quite clear. What do you need to be able to get to our goals, to support our athletes to make sure that we get the achievement success that we know that we will get to? What do we need to get there?”
The simple answer is money, and that’s where Ring’s background provides the most significant boost. Meehan and his staff, including coaches Yuri Suguiyama and Kim Williams, need to travel to meet with coaches and teams throughout the year. Elite athletes need revenue opportunities to maintain the lifestyle required for top performance, budgeting for nutrition and recovery while not having to worry about meeting their basic needs.
Ring and his staff plan to focus on building corporate partnerships to provide the backing these swimmers and coaches have sought for so long. “What can we do to get more partners involved, more commercial partners?” Ring said. “What we can do from a fan experience, to make sure that we are getting new ways to have people consume the sport? And I can’t give you the exact answers to what those are, but we want to make sure that we are creating a great fan experience that should hopefully also start driving revenue and working with our partners to make sure that we are doing what’s in the best interest of the sport.”
Ring believes that swimming, when packaged correctly, can be appealing to spectators who might typically ignore the sport, thus creating an even more robust marketing base. As evidence, he cites his own recent introduction to swimming.
“I think there’s a lot of people that, if they understood what the sport is, the excitement in it. Listen, I was almost taken aback. When you go there and you’re watching from a viewing experience, it’s incredible. It’s finite, who wins and who loses is very clear,” Ring said.
“If we can start getting that more visible outside of the people who have a passion and love for the sport, because they’ll always follow it, but how do we get that to people who may not follow it regularly? Say, ‘You know what, I want to get involved this. I want to follow this. I want get my kid involved in this. I might want to swim in a Masters program because that was pretty cool when I watched that.’”
Grosser emphasized that USA Swimming is looking for arrangements that provide value for both sides as well as for USA Swimming’s membership. The organization hopes that kickstarting success on the elite level pays off not only with medals but stronger tools for marketing and increased interest in the sport at non-elite levels.
“It’s very intuitive,” Grosser said. “If we have success in the pool, and we continue to have that standing as the greatest swimming nation in the world, our athletes are these great stars on the international stage. That gives us an incredible platform to then market the sport, to attract corporate sponsors, to open up opportunities to access to those athletes at our events and unique experiences. And so it all kind of builds in this self-sustaining cycle.”
What Ring Can Add to USA Swimming
If Ring succeeds in spurring growth in USA Swimming, he will have to leave his fingerprints all over the organization. First, he can promote his ultimate vision for success, one which prioritizes following the correct procedures rather than taking shortcuts to a desired outcome.
“It’s accountability,” Ring said. “It’s accountability to the community, it’s accountability to each other within this building, accountability to our national team athletes. Our success is going to be incredibly visible in 2028 because we’re going to have the world watching. I still believe we have the most elite athletes, and we’re going to do an incredible job in LA 28 with Greg’s leadership. I think that’s going to be a huge part of what our success is going to look like there, but it’s not going to only be defined by what happens with the elite level.”
There are personal qualities that Ring can inject into the organization. Throughout his years working in sports business, he has continually emphasized personal relationships and in-depth conversations. He believes that a face and a voice rather than a cold, impersonal email can go a long way in mediating conflict and serving the membership that makes up USA Swimming, just as was the case during his years working in golf.
“If you can look somebody in the eye and have that conversation, there will be times we disagree, but if you can have honest, respectful conversations, I just always believe that that’s the best outcome,” Ring said. “I don’t know any other way to lead other than to have the humanity, the empathy, the gratitude for what we all get to do every day, and to go on the deck and say hello, to say thank you, to understand, listen, learn, and take that information and do my best.”
Finally, Ring hopes that his perspective as a newcomer to swimming provides some tangible benefits for growth, breaking through to new potential consumers and participants.
“What are all the places where we can get outside of the way we’re going?” Ring said. “We don’t want to keep talking to ourselves to grow. We need to actually expand outside of the core swimming community, never losing our base, never losing sight of our core, but also making sure we get other people who are aware of what a wonderful sport this is.”
