Should USA Swimming be considered a for-profit organization?

Matt Farrell is the managing director of business development for USA Swimming and he was on Swimming World's morning show and spoke with Brent Rutemiller regarding the Flowswimming fiasco. In no uncertain terms, phrases, or clichés he said that traditional media sources such as newspapers and magazines are the primary media sources that USAS wants at their swim meets and that they will not shut these media sources out.

Mr. Farrell then states bluntly and with conviction: "...USA Swimming and Wasserman do not share a goal of shutting out other members of the media at swimming events. He said USA Swimming's goal is to promote swimming and expose it to as many people as possible. ..." [Link]

In my opinion that is a scripted falsehood. In fact it is even demonstrable with numbers and swanky charts. For instance, if you go to a site called alexa.com you will find a search engine where you can type in a website address and scan its rank within its particular field.

SwimNetwork, the WMG property that hosted 2007 nationals, has a ranking of 614,337. That is not a bad ranking, it's not in the top 100k but it ranks twice as high as my blog and my site ranking isn't that bad either.

However, if you were USA Swimming and your goal was to "expose [swimming] to as many people as possible. ..." wouldn't you consider a media credential for a swim site that had a ranking that was perhaps twice as high as SwimNetwork's? What about a rank about 13-times higher? Well, Flowcast.org has a rank or 45,962 as compared to Wasserman's 614,337 and Flowcast is the network that hosts Flowswimming.

The Wasserman Media Group, has pulled fan videos from You Tube that were displayed on this site, videos that were never more than a minute or two long. They did so by yanking them from You Tube thus denying tens-of-thousands of people the ability to see good swimming. If you want to expose swimming to as many people as possible, do you really go out of your way to pull fan videos or media credentials of those sites that have driving more media traffic to their sites as compared to your media partner?

Fact: the Kate Ziegler fan video alone has garnered over 22-thousand views on You Tube. Even WCSN, who hosts swim videos there as well, has as many as 60-thousand views on a single swim video. These statistics definitely conflict with Mr. Farrel's statement regarding USAS wanting to expose swimming to as many people as possible.

I think it is self evident what the truth is and it revolves around a man named Benjamin Franklin and that for me puts USAS non-profit status in question.