As executive director of United States Masters Swimming, a Sarasota-based group preparing to host the Pan-American Masters Championship here in June, Butcher will soon be in the spotlight as much as many Olympians.
And the 40-year-old will be under nearly as much pressure: The championship is expected to draw thousands of swimmers and spectators from around the Western Hemisphere ? Mexico, Canada, South America and the Caribbean.
The competition will mark a series of firsts for Southwest Florida, Butcher?s organization and the Pan Am meet.
It will be the first time that the biennial championship has been held in the U.S. in its five-event history. It also marks the beginning of what could be a series of international sporting events in the region ? and an important test of the community?s logistical abilities as area venues try to land the 2017 World Rowing Championships, a major LPGA match and others.
?This isn?t just about hosting competitions,? Butcher said. ?It?s about promoting the sport of swimming for adults, even as just recreation.?
The Pan-Am event ? coordinated with help from the Sarasota County YMCA ? is expected to fill 4,000 hotel rooms around Southwest Florida and have an economic impact of some $3 million.
The competition is scheduled for June 1-13, mostly at the Sarasota YMCA?s Potter Park aquatic center and on Siesta Key Beach. It will be a logistical challenge, requiring an army of volunteers, interpreters, safety officials and event sponsors, too.
Butcher will be front and center as he continues to steer U.S. Masters Swimming through an evolution from a volunteer-based organization to one with an expanding paid staff and higher expectations.
Hired in 2008, he is the only salaried director the group has ever had.
He?s also the father of 2 1/2-year-old twins.
No wonder Butcher still tries to find time nearly every day to hit the pool for a stress-reducing swim.
Soccer to swimming
Butcher grew up in Daytona Beach, but swimming wasn?t his sport of choice back then. Soccer was.
He didn?t start swimming until his teenage years.
?My sister swam, so finally I gave in and tried it,? Butcher said.
A natural athlete, Butcher quickly realized he was pretty good in the water. He swam on his high school team and competed as a four-year varsity swimmer while earning a bachelor?s in business administration and marketing from Georgia Southern University.
He continued to swim at Auburn University while working as a post-graduate intern in sports marketing in 1995. He already had earned a master?s degree in sports management from Georgia Southern.
It was while at Auburn that he joined USMS.
But the group wasn?t the only thing he was introduced to while at Auburn. There, he met Olympic Hall of Famer Rowdy Gaines, who convinced Butcher to be his temporary agent.
?I needed someone who I could trust handling the stuff I was doing,? said Gaines, who today hosts an annual masters swimming event in Orlando, the ?Rowdy Gaines Masters Classic.?
?We quickly built up this friendship,? Gaines recalls. ?I always thought he was the smartest dude on Earth.?
Though he was making strides with Gaines and in the world of sports marketing, Butcher returned to Florida in the late 1990s to give swimming professionally a go, training with Steven Lochte, the father of American swimming phenomenon Ryan Lochte.
In 2000, at 28 years of age, Butcher traveled to Indianapolis to swim in the Olympic trials against a pool of accomplished athletes, including Olympian Ed Moses and former world-record-holder Brendan Hansen.
Butcher did not make the Olympic team, but he says now he didn?t need to.
?Qualifying for the trials was enough,? Butcher said.
After climbing that liquid mountain, he retired a short time later from professional swimming to focus on his marketing career.
In Daytona, Butcher worked for the International Speedway Corp. ? the owner and manager of NASCAR race tracks ? marketing and promoting events at speedways across the country.
In 2006, he took over the job of chief marketing officer for World Racing Group, a car-race sanctioning body and owner of seven speedways.
While Butcher was drawn by the lure of fast cars, he continued swimming as a hobby.
Two years into the World Racing gig, he was approached by USMS and encouraged to apply for the job of executive director.
The organization, which sanctions swimming competitions nationally and internationally for adults ? hence the term ?masters? ? was in the midst of changing from a volunteer-run organization to one with a paid professional staff.
?In order to grow our organization and become more professional and well respected among other sports groups, we needed to have a full-time staff,? said Nadine Day, USMS? current board president. ?Rob was a natural fit. He comes from a strong marketing background and he?s a swimmer, so he understands the sport and how to market it.?
Day and the USMS selection committee saw in Butcher an ability to elevate the group.
?He just gets the big picture ? this isn?t just an ?old people swimming? organization,? Day said. ?He brings an energy to the organization and has really taken it to the next level.?
Since taking over in the summer of 2008, Butcher has grown the group to more than 60,000 members.
He also smoothly moved the headquarters to Sarasota from Charlotte, N.C.
Chuck Wielgus, executive director of USA Swimming, the governing body behind competitive swimming in the U.S., marvels at the job Butcher has done.
?That?s a huge cultural shift for any organization,? Wielgus said of the transition to paid staff. ?But he was ready to rise to the occasion, and had a vision of where he saw USMS going and what it really could be.?
Watery hurdles
The job has not been without some pitfalls.
In addition to the headaches associated with moving the headquarters, hiring staff and growing membership, Butcher was forced in early April to deal with an unprecedented brouhaha that, under different circumstances, would have been a public relations coup.
It began when Lance Armstrong ? yes, that Lance Armstrong ? entered a USMS-sanctioned swimming event in Austin, Texas.
Armstrong, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France, had been a USMS member for several years when he signed up to compete in a regional championship.
Though the event in question would be a non-Olympic course and not contested on the international stage, U.S. Aquatic Sports, a USMS affiliate, said no.
Armstrong, who had been stripped of his cycling titles by the World Anti-Doping Association for violating cycling?s ban on performance-enhancing drugs, was deemed ineligible to swim in any competitive, sanctioned USMS events.
On April 4, Butcher released a brief statement outlining USMS? position.
?Lance Armstrong is not eligible to race in U.S. Masters Swimming competitions,? it began.
But while the controversy swirled, Butcher appeared ? at least publicly ? calm and collected.
?I remember Rob being in a sports commission meeting with us and getting a phone call,? Virginia Haley, president of Visit Sarasota County, the area?s tourism bureau, said of the call Butcher got from a U.S. Aquatics? official.
?He was so polite when he gave us the reason why he had to leave so abruptly,? she added. ?I don?t think he could have handled that better.?
Pan Am Championship
The seeds of bringing the Pan Am Masters Championships event to Sarasota date back to 2008, when Visit Sarasota County and the Sarasota County Economic Development Council teamed up to try and lure USMS to Sarasota.
?It was the first time we?d so closely collaborated with the EDC on a business relocation,? said Haley, who also credited the Sarasota YMCA and Myrtha Pools, a Sarasota-based company that builds Olympic and other elite event pools worldwide, with helping to lure Butcher and USMS.
The Pan Am meet is garnering attention in some quarters for its lack of public financial support. In contrast with the 2017 World Rowing Championships bid, no public money is being devoted to offset the costs of the swimming championships.
Sarasota County did, however, provide money to the Sarasota YMCA to help make necessary improvements to Potter Park, where most of the swimming events will be held.
But the decision to bring the championships here was not without controversy, as Fort Lauderdale?s renowned International Swimming Hall of Fame venue and others nationwide seemed to represent a more logical choice than Sarasota at first glance.
But Visit Sarasota and the EDC?s instincts have been proven right so far.
The USMS staff, a half-dozen in 2008, has doubled since then. Butcher expects to have as many as 20 employees in the next year or so.
USMS?s growth has been big enough that Butcher plans to re-evaluate the group?s business plan in 2015, based on recent success.
Butcher credits Southwest Florida with helping catapult the organization to new levels.
?Moving to Sarasota really brought the masters swimming community together,? he said. ?When we were in Charlotte, everything was so new and still so scattered. People saw the potential for something great in us, and we think we are living up to that.?
If all goes well, the Pan Am event could spark other international competitions and further fuel efforts to attract sports-related tourism to Southwest Florida ? the rowing championships and the Concession Golf Club?s effort to draw the LPGA?s Solheim Cup, one of the top U.S. tournament for women?s professional golf.
?This event is showcasing Sarasota to international visitors who have never been here before,? Butcher said.
?We are excited to put Sarasota on the map.?
Article source: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20130525/article/130529760
Source: http://www.yourfloridahome.org/?p=2681
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