Of all the small joys that coaching youth swimming provides – the smell of chlorine, the sound of 50 little freestylers churning the water’s surface – the most hilarious might be the sight of the children in their swim caps. There’s always a kid who wears his ears outside his cap so that they get smushed down and stick out like elf ears; some kids opt to wear their caps sideways so that the seam runs the wrong way, and the lettering appears in the front and back instead of on either side (basketball head, my personal favorite); and for many girls, hair refuses to be contained, and the cap, as if recognizing that its purpose is defeated, incessantly falls off. Even when kids do wear their caps correctly, the contrast between their outward transformation into little swim soldiers and their coinciding obliviousness to it is a testament to the fortitude of the individual souls that dwell within their little bodies.
Such was the juxtaposition of my six-year-old son Scotty’s face looking at me and his head capped in green latex that announced him as a Creekside Crocodile – endearingly hilarious. It was my first swim meet as just another parent rather than an athlete or a coach, and it was his first as a competitor. I was celebrating with my first ever swim meet beer, chatting with one of my favorite couples on the team, when I felt a small hand give my forearm a firm but gentle tug.
“Where’s Mommy?” Scotty wanted to know, and I was immediately struck by how small he still is, his face earnest and looking slightly put out, and the top of his head replaced by that most fascist of all sports uniforms, the summer league swim cap.
Whoever put it on him had done a perfect job. It swallowed up every bit of his hair, his ears, and the top half of his forehead, and it showed hardly any ripples along the seam. With his tight-fitting jammer and the goggles hanging from his hand, the cap gave him the look of a professional aquatic athlete in miniature, something he is most decidedly not.
I was aware of parents’ and kids’ eyes on me as I bent down to address my tiny swim soldier. “See, Coach John has his own kids on the team,” I heard a mom say to her daughter, apparently trying to assuage the girl’s confusion at last year’s coach existing outside the box her mind had constructed for him, roaming the deck at her meet like some kind of creep.
“You have a little while before your race,” I told Scotty, thinking that I could point him in the direction of our cooler and his water bottle, thereby ending this accidental play we found ourselves performing. Scotty was less than satisfied, though, and just as he was unaffected by the cap meant to squeeze his head into aquadynamic conformity, he was unbothered by the audience we had, if not unaware.
“What do you mean?” he said, assuming the question pose, hands at hip height, palms facing the sky. “I’m done.”
At that point I tried to explain to him the difference between warmups and the actual competition, to pretty much no avail. Apparently, for Scotty, a 25 freestyle is a 25 freestyle. Sometimes there’s a starter horn, and sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes there are a lot of other kids in the lane, and sometimes there are none. Sometimes people on the deck are cheering, and sometimes they aren’t. The varying degrees of theatrics matter much less than his performance of the task at hand, which ultimately boils down to this: somebody tells you to go; you swim to the other side; and then you’re done. That’s all there is to it.
Ultimately, Scotty swam his 25 freestyle in the competitive heats, finishing middle of the pack in his first ever timed event. He remained unconvinced that it was somehow different from what he accomplished during warmups, though, arguing with his older brother all the way home about whether he had swum one race or two. Cartter, who never would have conflated warmups with the pageantry of the actual competition, won the backstroke that night, a surprise, and I confess, a bit of a thrill. Seeing him walk towards me with a blue ribbon in hand, I felt cheaply validated, and I was happy that he was smiling. Notably, he raced without a cap. What I hope to remember most from my first ever meet as just another parent, though, is my celebratory beer being interrupted by Scotty’s little hand on my arm, his spirit unconstrained by watchful eyes and swim cap alike as he looked up at me to ask, “Where’s Mommy?” and then to tell me, “I’m done.”
The Raging Elitist 