I have a little bit of guilt now that I’ve passed the coaching responsibilities for our neighborhood team on to the next person. At first it stemmed from the way the kids looked at me when I walked onto the pool deck, confused, forlorn even. That’s passed, though. Nearing the season’s end, my former swimmers are all smiles when I see them and congratulate them on their races. Now, I have a new reason to feel guilty. It’s that my favorite part of attending the meets as a parent rather than a coach isn’t sitting with my family or watching my kids swim; it’s hanging out with the other parents. I guess I figure that since Cartter and Scotty already occupy such a huge portion of my time and since I spent hundreds of hours each of the last three summers managing the team, I’m entitled to a couple beers and some decent conversation. Imagine my disappointment when I approached our last meet with this attitude only to discover near the evening’s conclusion that my boys were causing a stir in the women’s bathroom.
Of course, this happened at an away meet, when we were guests at another team’s facility. I’d just finished an essay about valuing sportsmanship over awards, and I’d made a speech to the boys on the drive over about acknowledging their opponents at the end of their races. Cartter said he might forget, which he did. So did Scotty. I know this, because despite my selfish indulgence in socializing with adults, I watched all their races. Each time they touched the wall at the end, they were hurried out of the pool by a coach, and they failed to offer a “Good race” to the kids next to them. Sportsmanship in summer league swimming has been ushered out in favor of efficiency. I like getting home at a decent hour, but I wonder about what’s being sacrificed.
Things have changed a lot in the last 15 years. Back then the team I coached would stop off at the ice cream parlor at 10 p.m., halfway home from a pool 45 minutes on the other side of town. Now, the ice cream place closes at 9. Bedtime is a much bigger priority than it used to be. My best guess is that somehow cell phones and their impact on parental neurosis are to blame. Whatever the cause of the increased emphasis on the timeline, the upshot is that not only does sportsmanship suffer, the competitive atmosphere that used to surround the summer league meets is watered down. There’s no time to announce the score during the meet, and when the score finally is announced at the end, most people have already gone home. And teams wonder why they have trouble keeping kids involved past the age of 10. If you make it all about ribbons and snow cones (not knocking snow cones; I stood in line for 15 minutes with Cartter and Scotty to get them each one), your target audience is about age 5-9. You might get the kids to bed on time, but they’re going to miss out on a lot they might have otherwise learned.
Competition and sportsmanship go hand in hand. You can’t fully appreciate one without the other. Case in point, when Cartter finished his leg of the medley relay, I had to urge him to walk down to the finishing end to watch the final lap of the race with his team. As he sashayed down the side of the pool with his hoodie towel draped over his head, his teammate, a boy named Owen who had lent Cartter goggles for the evening, made a desperate charge to overtake the swimmer two lanes over and steal victory for the ‘B’ team. The boy he came back on was a year older and stronger and had won the individual freestyle event at the beginning of the meet. The relay victory was the 7-year-old equivalent of a Jason Lezak moment. Cartter was oblivious. After the race, I escorted him to where Owen and his mother were sitting, and he stood there speechless while I congratulated Owen. He could barely manage a thank you as he handed over the borrowed goggles. About five minutes later, he was excitedly alerting me that the real fun was happening in the women’s room.
There was a dispute with two little girls from the other team standing outside the entrance to the facilities. The girls were clearly up to no good, but in the apparent turf war that had developed, they had the legal high ground: “They shouldn’t be going in there,” one said. “Yeah, and they shouldn’t be looking under the stalls,” said the other. Bitches both, and I did not enjoy in the least deferring to their authority and apologizing.
At least I had the ensuing interrogation to channel all my anger and disgust. I had no idea I was so instinctively gifted in this area. Must come from my mom’s side of the family. After several one-on-one interviews, the boys took to coming up to me on their own to deliver more details. Cartter was more willing than Scotty to rat on his brother and their coconspirator (who also seems to have been the idea man of the bunch). At one point, his forthrightness about the scene he discovered almost blinded me to the fact that his story necessarily included the words “when I went in there.”
Once I got a clear enough picture to be satisfied that whatever had happened, it was unacceptable, I set about humiliating both my sons. I dragged them to the other team’s coach and issued an apology on their behalf. Ditto our team’s coach (my replacement!) the next morning. I made no bones about expressing my dismay with other parents on the pool deck while Cartter and Scotty stood next to me looking at the ground. Scotty cried at bedtime the first night. Cartter waited until dinner the next night. If they had cared about the outcome of the meet, they might have been watching the final heats instead of getting in trouble.
Of course, focusing on the competitive aspect of a dual meet comes with pitfalls too. 15 years ago, when I went with a team into a neighborhood called Pine Forest, I had to tell a group of kids to go to the shower and wash off their temporary tattoos. They were done by hand with marker, an impressive rendering of a stand of pines engulfed in flames with a message arcing above and below that read in black block letters “BURN DOWN PINE FOREST.” On one boy the image took up most of his back. I felt fully justified in censoring this dark attempt at team spirit, even though the tattoo artist’s father took umbrage with my decision. “Well, if they have to wash that off,” he said, “these other kids have to wash off that ‘Eat My Bubbles’ stuff.” No, sir, they do not. They’re firing pea shooters, and your kid is discharging a flame thrower. My kids’ bathroom shenanigans are tame by comparison, and your assholery is much worse than my own.
At least the cartoon arsonist had a chance to learn about sportsmanship. His dad ruined it, but before that happened, the competition had captured the child’s twisted imagination. The rivalry between teams in my boys’ meet was so dull that Cartter and Scotty went thrill-seeking elsewhere.
Maybe I’m supposed to be watchdogging my kids and in thrall of the points being scored in each heat the entire evening. Maybe two beers is two too many. I don’t really think so, but on the drive home after the meet, I wondered how much of an ass I seem to people. The worst moment wasn’t when I found the boys misbehaving; it was when Cartter got confused about whether I was volunteering for the night or just watching, and he voiced it in the most pointed way possible. “Why are you here?” he asked in front of a small crowd where we had our chairs.
I sprung up from my seat to quietly admonish him: “Why would you ask that? I’m here to watch you.” It was only half true. I’m glad the boys are part of our neighborhood team, that they’re swimming well, and that I get to watch them race, but as much as I care about all that, I’m equally as interested in having a good time, even if that means I’m a selfish and desperate parent. Just like competition is the other side of sportsmanship, embarrassment is the other side of social life.
The Raging Elitist 