It is Wednesday 13 September 2017 and the world has just received an email from the CEO of Swimming New Zealand. In it Steve Johns discusses the departure of National Head Coach, Jerry Olszewski. Make no mistake: it is fantastic to get news from Swimming New Zealand. The email doesn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know but any news is better than the “Washington-behind-closed-doors” approach normally characteristic of Bruce Cotterill and his minions.

What is not good about the Swimming New Zealand email is the appalling grammar and sentence structure. I have mentioned this shortcoming several times before and have even offered to act as a volunteer proof reader. The abuse of the English language is sufficiently bad that it takes away from the message. No self-respecting CEO should allow this rubbish to be circulated to the public. Many readers are going to think the obvious. If the CEO is cavalier and sloppy with the English language, what else is he cavalier about? Is his other work as sloppy as his English?

For example, Johns says, “Dear Swimmers, Coaches and support staff.” If swimmers and coaches merit capital letters so should support staff. It is normal for the “Dear” line in a letter to end with a comma but Johns has gone with a full stop.

Johns says, “before making any decisions on the future might look like.” The word “what” has been left out of the sentence.

Johns says, “We are acutely aware of the large loss of HP IP from the SNZ team.” I know that HP is High Performance and SNZ is Swimming New Zealand. I have no idea what IP means. He can’t possibly be referring to “intellectual property”. Or can he? It is the sort of pretentious, meaningless garbage we’ve come to expect from Antares Place. Besides, no one leaving the High Performance Centre is their “intellectual property”. In twenty years, that programme never created anything. Using abbreviations that are wrong makes the author look ridiculous. Using abbreviations without explanation is poor English. Johns must have been told in his high school English class, “When in doubt, spell it out.”

Johns says, “We will certainly be keeping you all update to speed with potential future developments as they are decided.” What a sentence of wonder. The meaning of “potential future developments as they are decided” is in question. Are they “potential” developments or have they been “decided”? It is difficult to be both. But the confusion of “all update to speed” is the real sensation. What Johns means is we will be “updated” or we will be kept “up to speed”. But I guess he thinks that by mixing the two it will be even more impressive. And so we end up with “all update to speed”.

And finally there is one paragraph that is a single sentence, seventy words long. I’ve noticed Johns’ ability to put together impossibly long sentences. He seems to have little appreciation of the value of a full stop. He clearly does not understand how difficult it is to read something that long. Seventy words is a stunning achievement even by his exceptional standards.  

There are a number of other issues, but I’m sure you get the idea.

There are however more important matters to address than Steve Johns’ English.   

For example Johns says that Swimming New Zealand will be, “leaning on the vast experience and expertise of those at HP Sport NZ”. That is an unbelievable thought. Hasn’t Johns figured out yet that it was the “vast experience and expertise of those at HP Sport NZ” that got Swimming New Zealand into this mess in the first place? Indeed the “vast experience and expertise of those at HP Sport NZ” has kept swimming in New Zealand broken and in despair for twenty years. It has not worked. Everything HP Sport NZ has told Swimming New Zealand to do has failed. Centralised training failed. A string of coaches have come and gone and failed. Why is Steve Johns going back there again? One of history’s great philosophers, Edmund Burke, has some advice for Steve Johns, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

I’m not at all certain what Johns means by “vast experience and expertise”. I’d really like to know just what experience anyone at HP Sport NZ has of coaching world class swimmers. I would need to see a very detailed resume of their swimming success. I suspect no one there comes close to the record of a dozen New Zealand coaches. Johns has told us someone there has “vast experience and expertise”. Now tell us specifically who and what.

Because I do hope one of the vastly experienced experts was not the guy sitting at the table next to mine in the Millennium Pool café this morning. This guy was talking swimming training to Mat Woofe, the trainee coach, who has been left in charge of the Swimming New Zealand high performance program. In my career I have been lucky enough to know well and discuss training with coaches like Lydiard, Jelley, Schubert, Lang, Keenan, Anderson and Lincoln Hurring. But I have never heard anything like the theories I heard this morning. I guess it could be best described at pseudo-science gobbledygook. While they talked, I hoped that this stuff had not been a guiding factor in previous Swimming New Zealand high performance programs. Even more, I hoped, the views were not indicative of where the high performance program is heading. Because if they are then it’s no wonder 2017 World Championship swimmers were taken to high altitude at the wrong time. No wonder trials are poorly scheduled. I don’t know who the guy talking to Woofe was but if he is one of Johns’ vastly experienced experts, then God help us all.

While we are on the subject of communications from Swimming New Zealand, I am confused by their most recent Facebook post. A series of photographs show the Prime Minister, Bill English, and his wife visiting, what they say, is Swimming New Zealand’s High Performance Team. The problem is half the people appearing in the photographs have nothing to do with the Swimming New Zealand High Performance Team. The Facebook presentation is a classic example of manipulated content, made worse by the presence of Swimming New Zealand’s High Performance Manager, Amanda White. She knows that the people being introduced are not part of the Millennium Institute’s High Performance Team. Has she been complicit in a fake news deception?

The majority of those being introduced to the Prime Minister are from private Auckland swim teams. It is entirely inappropriate for Swimming New Zealand to use fake news on its social media platforms to promote private teams. David Lyles is there. He was made redundant by Swimming New Zealand and then went to court to claim compensation and lost. I wonder if this is Swimming New Zealand’s way of telling us that Lyles is about to be welcomed back. Dear God, I hope not. Laura Quilter is there. She retired a year ago. Bobbi Gichard is there. She used to swim at the High Performance Centre but left to train with Lyles. Daniel Hunter is there. He trains with the Counties HPK Swim Team. The Facebook impression of a thriving, prosperous Millennium swim team is a fabrication. It is fake news intended to either fool the Prime Minister or promote his chances of electoral success. Either way the post is deceptive.      

It has been six months since my last visit to the Millennium Pool. While I’ve been away I see that three “Power Pac” swim machines have been purchased. When the programme only has half a dozen swimmers why are three machines necessary? They will have cost about $11,000 in total. Perhaps the vastly experienced guy in the café thought they were a good idea. Knowing what the HP program has become their presence is a mechanical folly of all that’s wrong in that swimming pool; all expensive fluff and no substance.