Over the years I’ve developed some rules for dealing with young kids at swim practice. One is, never ask a swimmer, “What are you doing?” The question is totally unproductive: it’s almost guaranteed to be uttered in anger and frustration, and the kid’s not going to have a good answer. Better to just go ahead and tell the athlete what you want done. Another rule is, give rebukes to the group as a whole, and give them from far away; give praise individually, and give it from close range. Public shaming is not a good way to foster a kid’s continuing interest in the sport; acknowledging success, on the other hand, is. Finally, smile and say the kids’ names a lot. They like that. Any age group coach would do well to heed these rules. They all boil down to putting oneself in the swimmers’ place, recognizing that the sport is exceedingly difficult, and remembering that children are entitled to at least as much respect as adults.
These pool rules ought to extend to all authority figures who interact with children, but sadly, there are plenty of people working in the realms of education and childcare who either think differently, or don’t bother to think at all. Take my third-grade son’s reading teacher for instance. I regularly hear tales of her students crying after being scolded in front of their classmates, and many a night I’m called into my son’s bedroom after lights out due to his anxiety about his work meeting his teacher’s satisfaction. Cue parental cortisol rush. Perceiving that a teacher or coach is mistreating one’s child is infuriating, particularly when that poor treatment is accompanied by a false air of superiority and expertise. I’m thoroughly put off when I receive 700-word emails that include such terms as “fluency passage,” “affixes,” “morphemes,” “Greek and Latin roots,” “spelling choice board,” “book club,” “snack and chat,” and “increase in pace and challenge” in reference to my eight-year-old’s daily workload. By the time I get to, “Thank you for your continuing support,” I’m rolling my eyes in disgust. If only K-12 teaching candidates were required to complete a year of club swimming before receiving their certification.
People who didn’t swim don’t know what it’s like to dread the sentence of the day’s main set. They don’t know the feeling of pinning one’s hopes to the second hand of the pace clock, willing it to slow down, desperate for rest, gasping for air, doomed to duck beneath the surface and push off again. They don’t know the isolation, the separation of worlds aquatic and terrestrial that occurs in training.
“See you in an hour,” a training partner once said to me before pushing off at the start of a threshold set, her quip the swimmer’s version of gallows humor. I tried to tell myself an hour was two episodes of The Simpsons, that it wouldn’t be long at all before we were above water and talking again, but I knew that deck time and pool time were completely different things. On my best days, I remember it still.
As a coach on deck, I dance from lane to lane, giving feedback and encouragement to the swimmers below my feet. Their faces turn to me, hidden behind caps and mirrored goggles, and I give short bursts of instructions before watching them turn back toward the water and resubmerge. An hour passes quickly this way for me, but for a kid trapped inside a set, agonizing over every second, time stretches, and an hour is an eternity.
During training the lap pool’s roiled surface is a wormhole that neatly divides the experience of time into that of the adult and that of the child. On one side the coach stands tall, carves up time with yardage markers and stopwatches, and devours it with ease; beneath his feet on the other, time is made thick and heavy underwater, and the pupil lies face down in it and labors through with difficulty. I can imagine the shocked expression worn by my son’s teacher as she suffers through the agony of this distortion and eventually climbs out to try to beg off a workout: “Look,” I’d tell her (privately, of course), “if you want to teach elementary school, you’ve got to do this. If the kids can do it, so can you.”
Of course, this hypothetical year of swim training would include meet attendance, and time standards and improvement would factor into initial job placements and starting salaries. Stripped down to a speedo, standing behind the blocks full of nerves, a time next to one’s name in a printed program for all to see – it seems to me a good starting point for appreciating a child’s vulnerable position in life.
A certain number of meet sessions spent in an apprentice role alongside a coach would do even more to illuminate the difficulty faced by young people under pressure. At meets, coaches experience something like the distortion of time that occurs in a swim workout. Amid the din of cheering and the humid chlorinated air, swimmers appear before them seeking answers, making excuses, struggling with emotions, and the heats go by in a seemingly endless procession.
Sometimes a meet’s crushing longevity verges on unbearable. Our Head Coach sent me into the morning session without him at a recent travel meet, and when he got to the pool midday, he said, “It’s amazing. You left the room, and three hours went by in ten minutes.” The night before he looked me in the face with dark circles under his eyes and said, “It’s just the emotional ups and downs of every single race.” It was his eighth day of state championship swim competition in less than two weeks. I saw it all over the deck that weekend: coaches were exhausted, and through this exhaustion, they fought to keep things positive for the kids.
I remember a head coach so desperate to maintain good vibes at a meet that she inadvertently veered into the darkness. It was during a session in which she was trying to juggle over a hundred kids, and she was running on fumes when a 13-year-old girl came to the coaches’ table on the verge of tears, upset after adding time in her race. The coach, who was watching a heat full of older athletes at the time, looked over her shoulder and scolded, “Your problem is you’re not having any fun! Start having fun!” The girl walked away stunned, and once she was gone (probably off crying somewhere), my fellow assistant and I looked at each other and smirked before hollering at our boss, “You’re not having fun, Liz!” “Yeah, start having fun right now!” To her credit, she laughed.
I guess every coach who’s a veteran of the sport has encountered the frustrating desire to communicate to a child the millions of yards swum, the hundreds of failures suffered, and the focused belief that precedes the few fleeting successes that make up a swimming career, as if this experience could be uploaded into the athlete’s mind, thereby saving the young swimmer a lot of pain and struggle. Perhaps, this kind of momentary lapse in judgment is what causes a third-grade teacher to light into her advanced reading group and scare them to the point of tears. One forgets that the kids have to learn for themselves. Then again, maybe the cause of such behavior is sheer ignorance, a kind of ignorance that a year alongside a group of swimmers might at least partially eradicate.
I don’t envy the job teachers have, but neither do I revere it the way it’s popular to do in public statements. Coaches make at least as much of an impact. Recently, a parent asked me what I like most about coaching. I talked about running practice and connecting with the kids, but after some time to reflect, I have a more precise answer: coaching as a former swimmer presents the opportunity to shepherd young people through one of the most difficult things they’ll ever do, to remember how it felt to suffer the sport as a child, and to treat kids with the respect they deserve. That’s what I like most about coaching. Thank goodness there’s not often much pay or long breaks for holidays and summer vacation. No doubt those enticements would attract more of the sorts of people who put on airs while they bully eight-year-olds.
The Raging Elitist 