USA Swimming

Surge keeps USA Swimming at the forefront of emerging technologies to solve complex business challenges

Helping USA Swimming leverage new technologies to better connect and serve its 350,000 member athletes and coaches, and legions of fans around the world

Challenge

USA Swimming wanted to reduce costs and gain better security and scalability for its applications while enabling a more robust online/remote user experience.

Outcome

Over 20 years, Surge – a Catalyte company (formerly Statera) has kept USA Swimming at the forefront of emerging technologies. The partnership includes the initial development and recent re-architecture of a comprehensive platform to better connect USA Swimming with its network of athletes, coaches, followers, employees and fans. The modernized platform forms the foundation for future enhancements and simplifies critical applications to better meet the needs of USA Swimming’s members and constituencies, including media outlets, international governing bodies and third-party commercial sports platforms.

Headquartered at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Co., USA Swimming (USAS) is the national governing body for competitive swimming in the United States.

It’s charged with selecting the United States Olympic Swimming team and any other teams which officially represent the United States, as well as the overall organization and operation of the sport within the country. USAS first engaged Surge (then Statera) in 2002 to develop a new, immersive membership and times management platform, as well as an industry leading mobile application. Delivered in just eight months, this platform helped USAS keep pace with its growing pool of athletes, coaches and fans.

Modernizing critical platforms, again

Surge – a Catalyte company has designed, built, implemented and supported more than 20 key applications for USAS, including Deckpass, its first mobile platform.

In 2002, USAS engaged Surge (then Statera) to design, build and implement a new membership and times/results platform in just eight months. Built on USAS’s on-premise infrastructure, this platform accrued additional modules and systems over the last 18 years. Due to its age and the current demand for more online/remote capabilities, USAS again engaged Surge to re-architect the platform in a container design running on Azure. The new platform is called SWIMS 3.0.

Increasing security and usability with cloud-first architecture

Surge designed, built and deployed the SWIMS 3.0 platform in Microsoft Azure, utilizing its native capabilities including security/access control, DevOps, redundancy, monitoring and scalability.

Surge is developing SWIMS 3.0 using single sign on (SSO) architecture to increase usability and interoperability across all USAS applications.

In conjunction with the SWIMS 3.0 project, Surge is also helping USAS streamline its membership registration process by developing a new Online Membership Registration (OMR) platform. This OMR platform will allow athletes, coaches, officials and non-athlete members to renew their annual membership accounts online, no longer relying on manual and in-person technical and business processes.

Keeping one lap ahead

The work on SWIMS 3.0 and the OMR platform lays the foundation for a continued overhaul of USAS’s full application portfolio.

This initiative is designed to simplify USAS’s overall application, database and infrastructure architecture to better meet the needs of its members and constituent community. Redesigning and rebuilding these legacy applications to be cloud-first will increase flexibility and scalability as USAS continues to grow its membership and provide the best user experience for swimming athletes and fans both nationwide and around the world.

Two decades of trusted partnership

USA Swimming has trusted Surge (formerly Statera) for 20 years to keep its applications and platforms current, secure and cost effective.

Modern, easy to use platforms

SWIMS 3.0 and Online Membership Registration streamline and modernize USAS’s applications, making them easier to maintain and enhancing the overall user experience.

Cloud-first

With the use of Microsoft Azure, Surge re-architected platforms and applications to be cloud-first, with an eye towards easy scalability.