Challenges and Strategies for Developing Greater Public Access to swimming facilities in Iran

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the challenges for developing greater public access to swimming and its development strategies in Iran. The research method was a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The population consisted of 16 participants, including experts in the field of sport management,, coaches and experienced safe guards, former athletes and members of national and club teams, managers of the Swimming Federation. Swimming pools in Tehran were considered as the research population (N≤100000). The sample size was 384 and cluster sampling method was used for choosing samples. In order to analyze the data, in the qualitative part, the thematic analysis method was used and for the quantitative part, the ANOVA, intergroup analysis, variance analysis and Friedman ranking test were used. The research results showed that the current status of the public accessing to swimming pools is not suitable and it’s related to the economic problems, cultural and legal constraints, lack of infrastructure and resources, inefficient management in this field. The results also showed that the public accessing and development strategies of swimming in Iran include economic planning, improvement of management resources, marketing and communication management, justice-based inclusive planning. According to the experts, the most important strategy for the development of swimming in Iran was paying more attention to managerial factors, while for the users, the most important strategy for developing and public access to swimming in the country was the economic factor.