Shame on USA Swimming for rolling out an ill conceived app that is based on disastrous underlying processes that fail on multiple levels. It’s easily the worst app I have ever attempted to use. More importantly, it’s not just the app that’s bad - it’s the underlying, poorly developed USA Swimming processes around registration and completing mandatory training courses that do not work properly. They are almost as difficult to complete when bypassing the app and accessing them directly on the website. The only thing that works properly and expediently is USA Swimming’s collection of our money. The amount of valuable parent and athlete time that USA Swimming’s embarrassingly bad processes are creating has got to be colossal in totality and leads one to resent the organization as a whole.

It’s been a long time since USA Swimming has rolled out their new app, and it has not gained any meaningful features since its rollout. It’s confusing to me how they have managed to mess up their mobile app so badly. The old USA-S app was laid out in a way that was very easy to understand. You could look up times (your own and those of other swimmers), swimmers could look at their patches, and you could easily follow national level meets. That was replaced with… a shell for the website that’s missing half the features? You can no longer perform time searches. Athletes can’t easily bring up their own times or see their patches. You can’t see live results anymore. As a coach, there’s not much for me to do with the app, except show my Member Card when arriving at meets. Due to some of the major shortcomings of this app, SwimCloud has exploded in popularity. So my question to USA Swimming: who is this app for? It’s not useful to athletes, not useful to coaches/meet staff, and not useful to parents.

Finally got my swimmer registered, whew! Not intuitive or clear, the “help” articles for assistance are not jiving with the registration process I went through. Finally logged in, looking for the deck pass features and there’s literally nothing left of an app that actually worked. Hmm…seems like someone subscribed to “if it ain’t broken, break it.“ so disappointed in USA swimmings ability to get this right. Was it rushed out before registration season? Another year of getting it right might have saved a bunch of egg on USA swimming’s face. Please bring back the features from Deck Pass!

As a parent and an official I use the app for everything from registrations to safe sport and backgrounds to continuing education & certifications. Never had a single issue. Is it the best app ever? No but it does what it needs to do. I see a lot of negative reviews and have to think those are the 100 out of tens of thousands that just don’t intuitively understand tech today. Get the app. Its FINE