Swimming disputes in Sarawak highlight governance, development, and data issues

Bill Price | 23 October 2017 Share

A few weeks ago, while the Badminton Association of Malaysia was busy reducing competitive opportunities for elite shuttlers in the country, the Amateur Swimming Association of Sarawak (ASAS) was trying to deny a group of young swimmers an opportunity to compete in Melaka. One may wonder why sport associations seem so concerned with limiting competitive opportunities.

Although both associations are, or were, trying to prevent athletes from competing I believe they address two different issues. You can read my take on the case of the shuttlers here. The Sarawak story is a different matter and deals with the overall governance of a sport.

Parties in disputes over representation or eligibility should be able to settle them by referring to structural rules from the national organization. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case here since recent remarks by the Sarawak Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture, Youth and Sports, Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah, signal that this may be more association politics than sport management.

The importance of the athlete cannot be overstated. Without them sport associations have no purpose. Associations should be doing everything possible to increase participation amongst athletes of all abilities. Artificially limiting participation makes no sense from a sport development perspective.

These kinds of squabbles within sport associations highlight a problem that most don't even recognize as a problem and that is the missing athlete base. Anyone who really pays attention to sport in Malaysia knows that the main problem isn't coaching, facilities, money, or anything else associated with high performance. It's the simple fact that Malaysia doesn't have enough athletes and, surprisingly, no association seems to be doing anything about it.

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Developing and then managing the athlete base is probably one of the most important sport association tasks. This is sport management at its most basic and vital level. Who are the athletes? Where do they train? Who are the coaches? I wrote about this before and described the scope of the data that needs to be collected.

To do this right associations need a database of all athletes in their sport, not just the elite or state level players, all of them. Athletes don't just pop out of the woodwork. Associations should be able to track their progress throughout their sport participation. Databases such as this would also uncover clubs and coaches who are better at creating talent than others. Over time this kind of data stands out.

As an example of how this works, USA Swimming has a database with over 400,000 currently registered athletes (they do athlete registration every year). If they wanted a list of all athletes they could easily get it. But the real value to this data is that we can learn where these athletes live, which states have the most swimmers and, maybe more importantly, which states have fewer swimmers indicating places for possible further development initiatives. By just looking at the numbers you can see where the sport is being developed and which areas may need a little help.

Additionally, all performance times from all swimming meets in the United States are in the USA Swimming database so it's easy to track an athlete's progress or which areas of the country, or which clubs, might be doing better than others. Data makes this kind of research easy.

Data also makes it easy to settle eligibility disputes like those currently being argued in Sarawak. Barring any other restrictions registered athletes should have a right to compete anywhere they want. Without the data the question of eligibility reverts to administrative bodies, like state associations and such, who are prone to political maneuvering if press reports are any indication.

The technology to collect the necessary information has been available for over twenty years. It's not expensive and it's not complicated. Sport associations that are serious about developing their sports need to get serious about data. Real data about the athlete base.

True development cannot occur without data.

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Bill Price (price@ussa-my.com) is the Chief Information Officer for USSA Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.