Longtime Swimming Executive Joel Shinofield Hired as USRowing CEO
Longtime swimming executive Joel Shinofield has been hired as the CEO of USRowing, it was announced on Wednesday.
Shinofield’s most recent position was with USA Swimming as its managing director of sport development. Shinofield was an assistant coach at the University of Minnesota who spent six years as the executive director of the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America.
Shinofield has been with USA Swimming since 2018, heading the division that was responsible for 60 percent of its revenue and serving more than 370,00 athletes, coaches, volunteers and officials.
“I am honored to join USRowing at such a pivotal moment for this sport,” Shinofield said in a press release. “Everything in my career — as a coach, an executive director, and a leader within Olympic sport — has been about strengthening the pathways that let athletes participate and excel. The rowing world is passionate and deeply invested in this sport’s success. I look forward to quickly becoming a member of the community, meeting our stakeholders at upcoming events, and working together to build on the strong momentum already in place.”
Shinofield replaces interim CEO Peter Roby, who took over in April after the resignation of Amanda Kraus. Roby will stay on as a senior advisor. The organization undertook a six-month search headed by search firm Elevate that engaged more than 200 members of the rowing community.
“Over the duration of the search, we listened to our community — members, athletes, coaches, clubs, and partners — about what they needed in a CEO,” said Robert Zagunis, Chair of USRowing’s Board of Directors and USRowing Foundation Trustee. “The profile they shaped called for a leader with deep national governing body experience, a member-first orientation, and the discipline to modernize how we serve this sport. Joel Shinofield is that leader. He has spent his career strengthening Olympic sport across the national governing body, collegiate, and club levels, and we are confident he will build on our current momentum and lead USRowing to new heights as we head toward LA28 and beyond.”
Shinofield is a novice rower. The native of Minnesota met his wife, Aubrey Borland Shinofield, while both were coaches at the University of Minnesota, her for the rowing team and him for the swim team. Borland was a rower at Princeton.
Shinofield served as the head coach and director of aquatics at Washington and Lee University from 2003-12. From 2012-18, he was CSCAA’s executive director, helping it grow from a difficult position to renewed national influence among the NCAA, USA Swimming and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, among other stakeholders.
“The thing that I see that’s similar is that both rowing and swimming—and this is why I’ve really gravitated toward the role at rowing—is they’re very community-based,” Shinofield said in a lengthy interview with Row2k. ‘Your local club is the way that you find entrée to the sport, and for the most part that is unadulterated. It is still local, grassroots people who are trying to bring people into the sport and are creating community.
“And thus far, there hasn’t really been a penetration by corporate sport. I’m not saying that that’s all bad. There are certainly some things to emulate there in terms of efficiency and the ways to make the experience better, to really focus on the experience to get more people in.
“But the thing that really drew me to rowing was the thing that I love about swimming: that it is fully community-based. Those people that make a difference in your life are there through your entire life.”
In the interview, Shinofield cites his experience of going through a lengthy period with a CEO at USA Swimming – 14 months, through two interims and a hire that didn’t take the job – as meaningful to his experience taking over now.
One difference he’d like to install at USRowing is that, in his previous experience, he said USA Swimming had “not been as good” at integrating the athlete voice into governance in that, “I think sometimes we look for the ratio and the number rather than thinking about the talent that that group brings, and so we have not been as good at identifying some of the talent and what they can bring. I think we’re getting better at that.”
Shinofield shared a lot of his experience with CSCAA and USA Swimming in fascinating detail in that interview.