Are Slipping Standards Killing Our Sport?

How slipping training standards are slowly killing our sport.

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Note: this editorial is an opinion piece and the opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of SEAduction.com, its staff or affiliates.

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The state of dive training in the U.S. is frequently rated solely from a perspective of safety statistics. Perhaps, for the health of the industry and the good of divers, we should also be looking at other statistics. As a 20-year veteran of the dive industry, I think it is time for a paradigm shift in how we evaluate the success of open-water certification and consider another set of statistics: How many new divers stay in the sport and grow as divers.

First: Let’s consider those safety stats the dive industry loves to tout. A review of the fatality statistics published by resources such as DAN shows that the number of divers who die while diving has remained more or less static over the last two decades. However, we should also consider that the number of new divers certified each year has been declining nearly consistently over the same period.  For example new certifications have dropped almost every year for the latest seven years available from 198,241 in 2001 to just 160,249 in 2007 – a decline of 19 percent.  This number is based upon reports from The Diving Equipment and Marketing Association (DEMA) that show the number of new divers certified by the major training agencies for those years as follows:

Year	New Divers
2001	198,241
2002	183,394
2003	173,476
2004	??
2005	162,729
2006	162,605
2007	160,249

Unfortunately, I don’t have any validated statistics which give us the accident rate per 100,000 divers.  Such data would be truly useful to evaluate safety – a topic dear to my heart as I have been researching accidents and reporting on them for a decade now. But even these statistics, if they exist, should not the end-all be-all of evaluations for our sport. In my opinion, a better measure of success would incorporate three entirely different statistics:

 

1) How many students complete an open-water certification program once they begin.

 

2) How many newly-certified divers have adequate knowledge and skill for real-world diving.

 

3) How many newly-certified divers stay in the sport and grow as divers.

 

So how does our industry stack up using these measures? You already know the answer: Not good. Not good at all.  But lets look at what the market research says.

 

According to a 1999 survey by the National Sporting Goods Association (the latest info available on the DEMA Web site) 26.8 percent of divers surveyed spent two or fewer days diving in that year. A report by the Leisure Trends Group (also posted on the DEMA Web site) indicates that although 68 percent of the population was aware of diving as a sport, only 19 percent had tried it. Worse: Of those who had tried scuba, 38 percent were disenchanted with the sport and never intended to try it again! This same report indicates that only 8 percent of the total U.S. adult population can be classified as either current or past divers and it indicates that 5 percent of the total U.S. population has tried diving but will never try it again (emphasis added). The numbers speak for themselves: We are failing new divers on a massive scale. And I think this failure starts with our basic training standards.

 

In the good old days, when divers were steel and tanks were wood, an open-water dive class was a comprehensive program. Entry-level divers built a great deal of skill through repetitive exercises some of which were much more difficult than the ones required today.  No I am not discussing push ups with tanks or the other paramilitary exercises the reformers are so quick to use in justification of the reforms.  I am discussing the reality that open-water divers also use to spend multiple sessions refining skills such as sharing one regulator while swimming, free diving and solving regulator problems underwater. More time was spent on self and buddy rescue techniques. In the late 1980’s through the early 1990’s, many of these skills were either watered down, made optional or completely removed from training standards in order to help more divers get into the sport or as a result of equipment refinements. I will admit some skills like regulator sharing (buddy breathing) are obsolete in the practical light of current equipment configurations, however, the confidence building skill that divers receive from practicing this exercise will never be obsolete.  The initial concept was that we could take background academics and some water skills out of open-water programs and then reintroduce these skills in the more advanced programs. Today, many of these skills don’t appear anywhere in our training programs until a diver reaches the rescue diver or, in some cases, the divemaster program. When you compare standards, it’s clear to me that today’s average instructor has less intensive water skill development and academic preparation than the graduating entry level diver of just two decades ago.

 

What is the end result? Certification agencies guard their data like national secrets, so statistics vary, but generally speaking only around 20 to 25 percent of newly certified divers go on to take any other dive class. This of course means that 75 to 80 percent don’t. Again, statistics vary but it appears that more than half of newly certified divers drop out of the sport within two years and most never even complete their 11^th dive.

 

So here is where the safety stats come into play. Proponents of the current standards are quick to point out that “the accident rate has not gone up.” Get a clue. No one sitting on their couch watching TV, driving to the ski slope or hitting a golf ball ever gets killed in a diving accident. If you don’t have divers, you don’t have accidents, so in one sense we seem to be rapidly progressing towards making our sport 100 percent safe by driving new divers away from it. The divers that do stick around are probably much safer today because we tell openly them that their certification to dive is actually just a “learner’s permit.” We send Buffy and Biff down to the Caribbean where they get on a boat that only runs to an overused reef and we put them in the water with a divemaster who all but holds their hand. In the words of Jimmy Buffett, they are “swimming in a roped off sea.”  But in the defense of the boat operators (I was one for nearly a decade), many are simply scared to allow divers certified today to do anything more adventurous, face it, doing CPR back to the dock just once is enough to make anyone gun shy.  On the other hand given the evidence, is it any wonder new divers are leaving the sport in droves?

 

In short, we have made diving our grandparents’ sport. It is not an adventure sport like it used to be. Go to any consumer dive show and assess the age of the average attendee. The average age of a typical diver has grown by decades since I have been in the industry. Why do these divers keep diving? Or, more importantly, why do newer divers quit? The answer is quite simple: Generally speaking, people do not participate in recreational pursuits that make them uncomfortable. Can any diver certified in a two or three -day quickie class really have the water skills necessary to be a comfortable diver?

 

So, here are the hard hitting realities: In any educational program, if only 20 percent of the students master the skills you teach, your program is a failure. Any lifestyle activity that can maintain the interests of its participants for no more than two years, is a failure. And it seems that divers are the last ones to recognize this fact. A noted executive at one of the largest publishing houses in America told me recently that his company would no longer pursue diving books or multi-media projects because scuba is “a dead sport which just hasn’t been buried yet.”  However, public fascination with the underwater world is as great as ever and diving is still prevalent in movies, TV shows and even video games. But for our sport to survive, we have to understand that we need a next generation. And, the next generation is quite clear about what it expects: real value for the money spent on a certification course. They don’t want a “learner’s permit,” they want adventure. Diving may have become grandpa’s sport, but when grandpa did it, the training was a lot more comprehensive, the adventure was real, he was prepared for the adventure and he expected it. Maybe that’s why he’s still living the adventure today.  Perhaps it is time that as an industry we reassess how we measure success and try returning to a comprehensive training model.

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