US Guide

USA Swimming and Safe Sport explained

If you run or are joining a competitive swim team in the United States, two names come up constantly: USA Swimming and Safe Sport. In short, USA Swimming is the national governing body for the sport, your team joins it through a regional Local Swimming Committee, and Safe Sport is the athlete protection program every member club has to follow. This guide explains what each one is, how membership works, and what the compliance side means for the people who keep a team running.

What is USA Swimming?

USA Swimming is the national governing body for the sport of competitive swimming in the United States. Founded in 1981, it has more than 400,000 members. As the national governing body it sets the rules of the sport, sanctions competitions, registers athletes, coaches, officials and clubs, and runs the national team program that feeds the US Olympic and Paralympic teams.

For a swim team, the practical takeaway is simple. If your team competes in sanctioned meets, it is almost certainly a USA Swimming member club, and your athletes, coaches and key volunteers hold individual USA Swimming memberships. That membership comes with rules to follow, and the most prominent of those is Safe Sport, covered further down.

How teams affiliate: Local Swimming Committees (LSCs)

You do not join USA Swimming directly at the national level. Instead, the country is divided into regional bodies called Local Swimming Committees, or LSCs. USA Swimming delegates governing and supervisory responsibility to each LSC within a defined geographic area. There are dozens of LSCs across the United States, and your team belongs to the one that covers its location.

The LSC is where a lot of the day-to-day membership work happens. Each LSC has a registrar who administers individual and club memberships for athletes, non-athlete members and clubs, and the LSC sanctions and oversees local meets. When people talk about registering your swimmers for the season, they usually mean registering them with USA Swimming through your LSC.

Membership basics for most teams look like this: the club itself registers as a member organization, coaches and officials register as non-athlete members, and swimmers register as athlete members. Each membership type has its own requirements, and adult members in particular carry the Safe Sport obligations described below.

What is the Safe Sport program?

Safe Sport is USA Swimming's abuse prevention program. USA Swimming describes it as a comprehensive program built on a multi-layered approach to keeping athletes safe. Rather than a single rule, it is a set of policies, checks and habits that member clubs are expected to follow. The four layers are below.

It helps to know how Safe Sport relates to the U.S. Center for SafeSport. The Center is a separate non-profit organization that holds exclusive jurisdiction over sexual misconduct and child abuse cases across the Olympic and Paralympic movement, including swimming. USA Swimming runs its own Safe Sport policies and education, while serious abuse complaints fall to the Center.

The Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policy (MAAPP)

The centerpiece of the policy side is the Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policy, almost always shortened to MAAPP. It sets concrete rules for the situations where minors are most at risk, so that interactions between adults and young athletes are observable and interruptible. MAAPP addresses these areas:

• One-on-one interactions between adults and minor athletes
• Social media and electronic communications
• Travel, both local and team travel
• Locker rooms and changing areas
• Massages, rubdowns and athletic training modalities

MAAPP is not optional. USA Swimming requires every club, Zone and LSC to implement the policy in full, and the applicable adults who have contact with minor athletes are required to follow it. For a team, that means having the current version of the policy in place, making sure coaches and volunteers understand it, and collecting the acknowledgements your LSC expects.

What it all means for a team's admin workload

Put the pieces together and a clear picture of the recurring admin emerges. For every adult member, someone on the team has to confirm a current background check, confirm that Athlete Protection Training has been completed and renewed, and keep the team's MAAPP-related policies in place and acknowledged. The training renews annually, and USA Swimming has required non-athlete members to renew their background checks on a regular cycle, so this is never a one-time task.

On a small, volunteer-run team this work usually lands on one or two people, and the hardest part is visibility: knowing at a glance who is current, who has lapsed, and what is due before the next season. That is exactly the kind of tracking that benefits from being in one organized system rather than a folder of screenshots and a spreadsheet.

Where Swimly fits

Swimly is swim team management software built for US teams. It does not replace your USA Swimming or LSC membership, and it is not affiliated with USA Swimming. What it does is take the administration around membership and compliance and keep it organized in one place, so the volunteers running your team spend less time chasing paperwork.

You can see what is included and how plans are priced on the pricing page, or explore what the platform does on the features page. Questions before you start? Email us at hello@swimly.club.

Frequently asked questions

Primary sources

The facts on this page are drawn from USA Swimming and the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Always check the official sources for the current rules, because policies are updated over time.

• USA Swimming: LSC Governance
• USA Swimming: Safe Sport
• USA Swimming: Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policy (MAAPP)
• USA Swimming: Athlete Protection Training
• U.S. Center for SafeSport