The ASCA World Clinic that was supposed to be held from September 8 – 13 in Orlando this year has been cancelled. The decision was announced via Facebook Live from the American Swimming Coaches Association and the hotel where the clinic was due to take place in Orlando was notified.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the clinic will be held virtually. ASCA has not finalized details as far as which application where the talks will take place, but they are looking at a variety of apps to see where they can get the best interactive experience.
ASCA CEO Steve Roush told Swimming World that the ASCA World Clinic will still take place around the intended dates in early September but will be online.
“Everything is still on the whiteboard,” Roush said. “We may end up doing it where it goes like 8 – 1:30 each day and do more days because the fact coaches will probably be back in the water and we want to make it easy for them to potentially be doing their workouts at home and still be attending the talks on their computers.”
The ASCA World Clinic was also a great opportunity for various companies to advertise and sell their products as exhibitors and vendors. That option will still be available to them at the virtual clinic, Roush says.
“They have different features on what we are looking at different banner ads that are scrolling through. You can go with video ads that get placed within the contents. The other piece too is a lot of them like the yearbook or handout via download. That still can be done but a lot of it is going to be on different platforms.
“That’s why we are still researching which company we want to go with so that it accomplishes that as well as the interactive piece and also the ability to be able to have networking opportunities. We have rooms people can go into and there’s no more than 15 let’s say and network. So people log on, get assigned to a room, go into that room and have a network happy hour.”
As for the hall of fame honorees, ASCA will likely postpone that until 2021. Since there will be no in-person gathering, the honorees will not have the opportunity of celebrating that achievement with a banquet with their families present so that will likely not happen in 2020, Roush said. The 2021 ASCA World Clinic has not been finalized for a location but Roush said it could stay in Orlando.
Coaches can register for the clinic here.