Speaking with a T-shirt draped in front of his podium that read “You’re Either A Lifeguard or You’re Not,” Wheeler admitted that some people may think he’s nuts; some drownings are inevitable, they claim. “It may be controversial, but at this point I’m tired of being politically correct,” said Wheeler, who also runs the Richmond, Calif.-based consulting company Total Aquatic Management. “If you do all 10 of these – and they’re not easy – I firmly believe that no one will drown in a lifeguarded pool.”

Any lapse, though, and Wheeler’s guarantee is invalid.

Here are his 10 steps to no drowning in a lifeguarded pool:

1. Provide back-to-basics training – including treading water and swimming, practicing active and unresponsive victim rescues, spinal-cord management, understanding of first aid and AED use, and professionalism.

2. Practice layered lifeguard protection, meaning that two rookies should never be stationed next to each other.

3. Encourage active supervision, which, in turn, encourages lifeguards to think twice before shirking their responsibilities. As Wheeler says, people behave better when they are being watched.

4. Train lifeguards in the so-called “One Minute – Two Minute Response and Care Objective.” Essentially, what this means is that within one minute, lifeguards need to see and retrieve their victim, and within two minutes, they need to move the victim to safety, administer oxygen and use an AED.

5. Have an AED and oxygen available at your facility. This is the standard of care for lifeguarded facilities. Wheeler suggests cash-strapped organizations apply for grants or ask for donations of used AEDs from local fire departments.

6. Adhere to “performance-based lifeguard development.” Have clear performance expectations, know each lifeguard’s performance vulnerabilities and develop training that incorporates performance enhancers.

7. Teach “when in doubt, check it out” or “if you don’t know, go.” Sometimes a lifeguard who spent months without a single rescue attempt might find it hard to believe a swimmer is in trouble, so second-guessing can occur, Wheeler says. Look for a “smudge of paint” on the bottom of the pool, he suggest, representing a swimsuit.

8. Practice aquatic zone defense by encouraging lifeguards to defend their zones and take pride in their territory.

9. Perform audits – even if that means videotaping lifeguards from your car, the bushes or through the blinds of your office window. Then fix what is wrong -- such as banning lifeguards from texting -- and refuse to tolerate poor performance.

10. Pay lifeguards what they are worth, meaning at least what local fast-food restaurants or retail chains pay. “I know there’s no money right now, but you have to do that," Wheeler says. "You get what you pay for.”

Sustainability, technology, the troubled economy. These are among the hot topics at this year's Athletic Business Conference & Expo. But year in and year out, a topic that remains one of the biggest draws among the thousands of attendees is risk management.

As Nathan Martin, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis, pointed out to attendees of a seminar he led on legal standards for fitness professionals, the reason for the topic's popularity is because it is an ongoing issue in any facility. "Risk management is a process and I want to reiterate that constantly," said Martin. "It never ends."

That was the message Martin and his speaking partner, University of New Mexico professor Todd Seidler, strove to communicate to attendees, who ranged from operators of large recreation centers to small health clubs.

Seidler shared the story of a former student who was injured by a handicap-accesible ramp built into an outdated YMCA swimming pool. After a trip to the emergency room, the student returned to the Y to let them know the underside of the ramp had sliced his forearm, requiring 12 stitches. The reply from the manager of the Y? "You're number 10," recalled Seidler, adding that facilities that don't respond to such foreseeable injuruies "may as well just open their checkbooks."

Martin showed slides of numerous news stories discussing fitness-related lawsuits of all kinds, whether related to personal trainers, malfunctioning equipment or lack of supervision. He also showed a headline that read, "Health Club Release Form Bars Suit From Injured Member."

"These are the headlines we want to see," said Martin.

Naturally, the financial consequences of liability remains a big concern for facility operators, but Seidler stressed that it shouldn't be the only consideration as they craft risk-management plans. "This is part of a defense but it's also the right thing to do," Seidler said. "Sometimes we work with municipal agencies, and they'll say, 'We have immunity.' But that doesn't mean they're doing the right thing.'"

For the hundreds of attendees representing parks and recreation agencies, a running theme through the early stages of this year's Athletic Business Conference & Expo has been doing more with less.

"How do you have severe cuts but no reductions in services?" Judith Leblein Josephs, president of the consultancy JLJ Enterprises, told a crowded room while leading a seminar focusing on how three New Jersey communities were able to leverage user fees to fund the maintenance and construction of athletic fields. "Right now it's all about survival in the Garden State."

Josephs was one of numerous speakers urging parks and recreation administrators to take a harder, more business-like tack to finding funding strategies. While leading a seminar on coporate sponsorships and naming rights, Judy Haber, a senior partner with the Performance Sponsorship Group, reminded attendees that they are often now in direct competition with a range of for-profit entities when seeking new revenue streams.

"We're competing with the media," she said of naming rights and other corporate sponsorships in municipal recreation buildings. And just as radio and television stations are doing the research to have their sales teams give potential advertisers hard numbers on potential returns on investments, she said, "We have to do the same."

Citing the Town of Newmarket (Ont.) Magna Centre, a multipurpose indoor athletic facility that bolstered its overall naming rights deal with secondary sponsorships, right down to naming rights for specific sports surfaces, Haber said it's important to communicate such business strategies to wary taxpayers.

"They wanted to get as much money into that building as possible," Haber said of the municipality. "The message back to the taxpayers was, 'We don't need your money.' "

Doing more with less was also a key concept in a seminar on optimizing contracting services that was delivered by Chris Nunes, director of parks and recreation for The Woodlands (Texas) Township. "The challenge for us is that resources are limited," Nunes said. "I don't see a lot of want ads right now in the parks and rec trade."

Nunes acknoledged that corporate sponsorships or outside contracting are just two of many business strategies municipal parks and rec agenncies should explore as they try to find their way in this difficult economy. Said Nunes, "She was talking about sponsorships and I was talking about contracting, but it really is about what works in your community."

While many youth sports organizations remain increasingly aware of the importance of keeping their young athletes hydrated during physical activity, Keith Wheeler says they should be doing more.

“Check their body weight before and after practice," Wheeler, vice president of research and development at Abbott Nutrition, an Abbott Park, Ill.-based maker of sports nutrition products, told a packed house at the Athletic Business Conference in San Diego on Thursday morning. "You can have a 50-pound kid lose two or three pounds during exercise in hot weather. If you want to take a scale to practice, fine – take a scale out there. It’s a critical safety issue.”

Wheeler repeatedly emphasized this practice, and encouraged youth sports professionals to stress it to parents and players. He recommends participants drink 12 ounces of fluid (water or sports drinks high in electrolytes and carbohydrates, not energy drinks) for every pound of weight lost during practice. “It doesn’t take that much time, and it’s a good indicator of how much fluid a child is losing during that period,” he says. If young athletes do not replenish lost fluids immediately after practice, Wheeler says they might feel weak and take up to 36 hours to fully recover from activity. Additionally, Wheeler recommends that young athletes drink 4 to 8 ounces of water every 15 minutes during practice, and hydrate with 16 to 24 ounces up to four hours before practice.

For more information about hydration in young athletes, click here.

When the San Diego Convention Center doors opened Thursday on the expo portion of the 2010 Athletic Business Conference & Expo, conference attendees accessed the largest gathering of athletics, fitness and recreation vendors that ABC has seen since 2008, and the fourth largest in the past 13 years.

The 320 individual vendors represented an increase of 33 over last year's ABC show in Orlando, Fla., and the 67,400 gross square feet of booth space was up by 9,800 (or 98 10-foot-square booths). Those figures also trumped anything witnessed from 1998 through 2004, and they greatly exceeded the expectations of ABC exhibits director Adam O'Brien.

Photos by Brian Ebner

"I think it's partly the location and it's partly people being tired of a down economy and just saying, 'We have to do this to market our products,' " O'Brien says, adding, "I've never had as much of a late push. In years past, the push has come right after Labor Day. This year it was November, and people were coming out of the woodwork --'We have to get in.' We sold the last booth for this show the Friday before Thanksgiving at 5 p.m. The show literally sold out, which is great."

Attorney Jeffery Long of Sacramento, Calif.-based Prout-LeVangie sees a lot of human suffering in his practice. Speaking at the Athletic Business Conference in San Diego this morning on "How to Avoid a Lawsuit," he listed some of his recent cases -- an exerciser whose trainer dropped weights on his chest, a health club member scalded by steam in the steam room and two gentlemen who landed in the ER with chemical burns after 30 minutes in a spa that (apparently) got accidently super-shocked. At the top of the list? Exploding exercise balls, four cases this year alone.

Although it's one of those incidents that sounds comical, it's a great big banana peel for facility owners, Long said. A person sitting or lying across a ball while lifting a set of dumbbells is at great risk of a couple of broken wrists in the case of a ball exploding, Long noted, offering the potential for a significant loss-of-earnings lawsuit. "If you have exercise balls in your facility," he warned seminar attendees, "be scared to death."

Long refused to name names, but he said even well-known ball manufacturers' products shouldn't be trusted blindly. His advice included: inspect balls regularly for any signs of wear (nicks and scratches), keep track of the date each ball went onto the floor, rotate balls in and out of service and, most of all, "Replace them on a regular schedule, regardless of what your inspections turn up."

"The devastating effects of brain injuries suffered by pro football players who repeatedly suffered concussions and subconcussive brain trauma during their careers have put the spotlight on CTE," says lead author Alexander Lin, a principal investigator at the Center for Clinical Spectroscopy at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "However, blows to the head suffered by all athletes involved in contact sports are of increasing concern."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 3.8 million sports- and recreation-related concussions occur in the United States each year. In addition, subclinical concussions – that is, injuries that cannot be diagnosed as concussions but have similar effects – often go unrecognized Studies have shown that individuals who suffer repetitive brain trauma are more likely to experience ongoing problems, from permanent brain damage to long-term disability.

CTE is a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated brain trauma and marked by a buildup of abnormal proteins in the brain. It has been associated with memory difficulty, impulsive and erratic behavior, depression and eventually, dementia. Recently, researchers found evidence of CTE in 21-year-old Owen Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania football captain who committed suicide in April.

In Lin's study, conducted in collaboration with the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE), five retired professional male athletes from football, wrestling and boxing with suspected CTE and five age- and size-matched controls between the ages of 32 and 55 were examined with MRS, sometimes referred to as a "virtual biopsy." A powerful magnetic field and radio waves are used to extract information about chemical compounds within the body, using a clinical MR scanner.

The imaging found suspicious chemical changes in the former athletes' brains. They'd suffered multiple hits to the head during play and showed behavior symptoms indicating possible brain damage. The chemical changes were not found in the five healthy study participants.

"Being able to diagnose CTE could help athletes of all ages and levels," Lin says.

The pool, built in 1967, was expected to be drained as school officials attempt to figure out why the glass shattered. A new pool is scheduled to open at Jefferson High next fall.