February 1, 2021 marks the 10-year anniversary of the public launch of SwimTopia. A decade ago, I was a parent volunteer for my kid’s summer league swim team. I created SwimTopia because I had seen first-hand how tedious and time-consuming it was to run a swim team. With my background in software development and user interface design, I knew I could help save coaches and parents a lot of time. I fell in love with summer league swimming and jumped at the opportunity to help teams create fun, character-building, healthy experiences for their families and communities.
While we have much to celebrate from the past ten years, my proudest accomplishment is the team we’ve created and the company culture we’ve built together. We care deeply about earning the trust of our customers and honoring the commitments we make. We look outside the box for creative solutions, and we’re always striving to grow and improve. With a mix of different strengths and experiences, we are a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. At the end of the day, our focus is on making customers happy, and having fun while doing it!
Our goal from the beginning has always been to save time and eliminate the hassle of running a swim team. In pursuit of that mission, we’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of software code and answered tens of thousands of support requests. We’ve launched three distinct products: SwimTopia (web-based team management), SwimTopia Mobile (essential app for swim parents), and Meet Maestro (dramatically better meet management).
As the preferred software provider to dozens of summer swim leagues around the US, including many of the biggest, we’ve grown to be the #1 team management platform for the US Summer/Rec swim market. From our roots in summer league swimming, we’ve expanded to serve middle/high school teams and year-round club teams across the United States and around the world.
Make no mistake, building a company is not easy, and we’ve faced our fair share of challenges. This past year has been especially difficult, facing down a global pandemic that has shut down pools and cancelled most summer swim seasons. We’ve always kept in mind that while this year was challenging for our company, it was even more challenging for our customers. I am proud of the way we rose to the challenge, proactively offering credits for cancelled seasons, adding features like virtual meets to give teams and leagues more options in an uncertain situation, and ramping up communications to disseminate best practices and information about how to run safe practices and meets in this time of COVID.
We hope that some of our efforts this past year have helped lessen the challenge your teams and organizations have faced. We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to help.
While we don’t expect this coming summer season to be back to normal, we are hopeful that it can be a step on the return path to normalcy. We have been busy this past year, adding features like virtual meets, upcoming swim reminders, and the ability to use our mobile app without a SwimTopia login using guest mode. We have been talking to teams and leagues that have been able to hold COVID-safe practices and meets, so that we can help share the lessons learned with you.
If your team skipped a season in 2020, you may have also missed new features like push notifications (replaces other text messaging apps), record book management, mobile-friendly websites, and the ability to sign up for meets and jobs from the mobile app. If you haven’t had a look around your SwimTopia account in a while, you should find a lot of nice improvements.
Finally, we would never have made it this far without the support of you, our customers. In fact, every single team that signed up for SwimTopia in our first two years in business is still a customer today, ten years later. We are forever grateful for and humbled by your faith in us.
We draw inspiration from all the amazing people we’ve met around the country and around the world who dedicate their time and creativity to strengthening their communities and promoting lifelong skills and healthy activities for kids of all ages.
Thank you for everything you do and for giving us the opportunity to help make that worthy mission a little easier and hopefully a lot more fun!
Sincerely,
Mason Hale
SwimTopia Founder & CEO
PS: If you love SwimTopia, we would really appreciate your help introducing more swim teams to SwimTopia and Meet Maestro. You can earn a $75 credit for every team you refer. We also provide free swim league websites, including amazing, time-saving features that make managing a swim league much easier. If your league doesn’t already use SwimTopia, please let them know about this offer!
