Bio
Douglas Sayles brings SwimWise years of experience on the host’s side of the table. He has served on the New England LMSC board since 2012, as its chair and registrar, as chair of the Colonies Zone and the USMS LMSC Development Committee, and as co-chair of the USMS Volunteer Relay leadership summit.
Those roles kept him close to the people at every level of Masters Swimming, and to their needs and constraints. He knows what a board weighs when it decides to spend its members’ money on education, because he has weighed that decision himself, many times.
In 2024 the USMS national staff chose him for its Ted Haartz Staff Appreciation Award, and in 2025 he was inducted into the New England LMSC Hall of Fame as a Contributor.
The Education Weekend model
As a New England LMSC volunteer, Sayles coordinated education weekends taught by Bill Brenner and Bill Meier — finding the pools and classrooms, filling the seats, and arranging dinners where staff, volunteer leaders, instructors, coaches, and swimmers socialize and exchange ideas. The weekend became something people cherish: an opportunity to learn, have fun, and make friends. It is the model SwimWise carries forward and builds on.
At SwimWise
Sayles runs everything outside the classroom — operations, host coordination, marketing, registration and payments, technology, and finance. When his schedule allows, he attends SwimWise education weekends in person and serves as a sounding board on governance challenges, membership growth, event operations, and running a swimming organization.
Events and coaching
Sayles also directs events, including Swim Across America’s Rhode Island Open Water Swim, one of the largest open water charity swims in the country, where more than 1,000 swimmers and volunteers turn out each year to fight cancer, and regional championship meets that draw hundreds of swimmers. The thread through all of it is bringing people together in a common cause.
He is a USMS Level 3 certified coach and Adult Learn-to-Swim instructor and a member of the American Swimming Coaches Association. He has competed too: a 2019 USMS Long Distance All-American with 20 Top 10 performances. For many years he helped run SwimRI, part of New England Masters Swim Club, organizing and coaching workouts and building a cohesive statewide team and social network.
Before Masters Swimming
Before Masters Swimming filled his calendar, he spent 20 years in corporate communications, at Grey Healthcare Group and Cone Communications, as a director at Biopure and RISE Engineering, and as a project and communications consultant.
Earlier still, he ran a mobile disc jockey business, Special Request Entertainment — his first turn at bringing people together. He learned to swim in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, and was an English major and swimmer at Bucknell University.