The Raging Elitist

With each reentry I’ve made into coaching, I’ve found that almost nothing I did before matters. When I was with Mount Pleasant Swim Club at the outset of my career, I had the best athletes and received a lot of recognition. High level swimmers showed up in droves. Now, starting a new team in North Charleston for the second time, it’s as if that success never happened. I have to rebuild my reputation all over again. None of today’s parents or swimmers remember when I was churning out state champions, and kids who are capable of changing a program drive past my pool to swim with other teams. Meanwhile, I’m left picking over the scrap heap of those other teams’ castaways. I want to be patient and trust that I’m capable enough to change the situation over time, but I worry about the self-perpetuating nature of being labeled a second-tier program. People’s opinions are sticky, especially the stupid opinions. The desire to rewrite them is a source of obsession and frustration.

This Fourth of July weekend I spent most of my time poring over the technical minutia in Gary Hall’s Fundamentals of Fast Swimming and the bevy of season planning resources available through USA Swimming and courtesy of my stepfather. I know I have one 14-year-old girl coming in the fall who will instantly take the lead in my Senior 2 group, and I’m hopeful that a 12 and under or two will show up and surprise me at tryouts. I’m determined to hit the ground running when short course season starts September 1 and to show the naysayers what they’re missing by passing over North Charleston.

Somehow, I never end up drunk on the Fourth despite my best intentions. Something always comes up. This year, in addition to all my swim planning, I fell victim to a summer cold, no doubt caught at a weekend-long swim meet in late June, so another fireworks display passed with me soberly watching. Sitting in the golf cart with Danyelle and the kids in the neighborhood tennis and swim club parking lot, I tried to reassure myself that I wasn’t missing anything, but I envied the looser congregants nonetheless. A group of men assembled around a pickup and took turns walking to a spot in the middle of the lot and lighting fuses that erupted and lit up the sky as they sauntered away. “Isn’t it funny that we do this?” Danyelle asked.

A loud bang rattled my sinuses, and gold, blue, and red streamers shone brightly in my upturned eyes. I was always afraid of fireworks as a kid, and even though I mostly like them now, they’re still jarring. “What?” I said, “Set off explosives?”

This was the first year that Cartter, who shares my sensitivity to loud explosions and other people’s opinions, hasn’t covered his ears at the makeshift firework show. He’s been similarly tolerant of my shorter-than-normal fuse lately as well. As I’ve thrown myself into the effort to build a winning program at the pool, spending the bulk of my time trying to get ahead in my self-directed learning and planning, my patience for run-of-the-mill stupid opinions has worn a little thin. When we went to lunch the day after the Fourth, and Cartter claimed not to like French fries, I told him not to say that. When he asked why not, I told him, “Because it’s a lie.”

We were seated in the dining room at our favorite local restaurant, Coleman Public House, and “Tropical Depression 3” was swirling just off the coast, bringing cloud cover, steady wind, and unseasonably mild temperatures. The weather was so uncommonly pleasant that when Danyelle and I set out for a walk, we decided to go back and grab the kids. They walked the two miles to Public House and sat across the table from their mother and me, disassembling and reassembling a chunk of small Legos they’d smuggled along for the occasion. In the adjoining booth behind me, a lesbian couple on a date talked loudly about the middlebrow movies they enjoy; Broke Back Mountain came up repeatedly. One of these gals was actually a man (a trans woman?), which set off nicely the artificiality of their entire conversation. At one point the biological woman mentioned “The Big Dance” in reference to the annual NCAA basketball tournament, and her trans date challenged her with an accusatory “WHAT’S THAT?” prompting the woman to backtrack and reign in her knowledge of sports culture, jokingly referring to “sport-ball.” This ridiculous prattle was the backdrop for my conversation with my son about French fries. Apparently, he saw a video at school about weight gain and diabetes, and French fries were singled out as particularly naughty.

“You can trust your mother and I to feed you properly,” I said once we were on the walk home and safely out of earshot of anyone who might be offended. I told him not to be guilty about his food, to enjoy it, that he’s active and that he has good genes; he isn’t going to get fat. Closer to our neighborhood, Danyelle and I were walking ahead, and, stricken with a sudden inspiration, I doubled back. “We just walked two miles to and from lunch, Cartter,” I said. “Fat people don’t do that.” He stared at the ground. “Are you convinced yet?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said. “I’m kind of convinced, but I’m kind of not.”

“Why not?”

“Well, if French fries are okay, then why does my school only serve sweet potato fries and not French fries?”

I decided this was a moment to be dismissive regarding the opinions being taught at my children’s school, and I granted myself permission to vent some of my righteous disgust. “Oh, that’s easy,” I said. “It’s because your goddam idiot headmaster has his head jammed so far up his ass that he thinks the whole world smells like his own farts!”

Cartter and Scotty both enjoyed this outburst very much, and the rest of the way home they periodically ran up to attest to some other inane lunch policy at their school: “The pizza is on cauliflower bread!” . . . “The hot dogs are tofu!” . . . “There’s no soup allowed!” . . . “The milk is soy!” Apparently, mashed potatoes and potato chips are okay; so are sweet potato fries; but a serving of French fries will destroy a child’s health and plunge him into a lifetime of obesity and diabetic suffering.

“I can’t wait to tell Bebop about this,” I said to Cartter.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because he’s going to agree with me.”

When we rode out to Dad’s house later that afternoon, the tide was all the way in so that it rippled just below the tops of the marsh grass as we drove across the causeway. Danyelle yielded the front seat to Sammy, who likes to look out the front windshield while riding, and the narrow windswept strip of road surrounded by water made her nervous. So too did the sensation of dropping as we rode down the far side of the little turning bridge. She trembled, whined, and did a subtle little two step in her seat as she pondered leaping into the back with Danyelle and the kids. The kids laughed while I sang to calm her, and we made our way to Bebop’s, the usual Saturday beach traffic almost nonexistent as TD3 made its way closer to landfall.

Outside the dining room windows, the sea was green and angry, and whitewater churned over the shallow bar. During breaks in the conversation in the den, I walked into the kitchen and pondered going for a swim. So far this summer there haven’t been any days with decent surf in front of Dad’s house, and this day was no exception. Instead of playing at the beach, we all sat in the den and watched the Braves lose yet another game (2025 has been one of their worst seasons in my lifetime). The boys were strangely present and attentive, seated on the furniture watching and listening closely as if they were little adults.

“We aren’t your teachers at your school,” I told Cartter.

“You don’t have to butter us up,” said Dad.

The topic was Cartter’s opinion on the film Bad News Bears. I’d showed him and Scotty the movie two nights prior, and when put on the spot, Cartter squirmed in his seat before offering that he was offended by the smoking and cursing in the movie. This prompted a lecture from Bebop and me on the intellectual laziness of forming one’s opinions entirely around taboos. George Washington was a great man; he could have been king, but he put his country first; he also owned slaves: should our opinion of him be based solely around the fact that he was a slaveowner? Bebop offered up this rhetorical question as a rebuttal to Cartter’s false squeamishness. It seems that at school, easy answers are favored over critical thinking.

Perhaps Cartter was reluctant to offer a genuine opinion because we had prompted him (like he is prompted at school). On the ride home, unprompted, he was quick to offer up his thoughts on our town’s development. Danyelle and I fielded questions from him and Scotty about our first date, and when Cartter learned that the movie theater we went to was slated to become an office building, his response was, “Oh come on! That’s so useless!” On hotels, he said, “Like we need that.” These thoughts seemed truly Cartter’s own. These were opinions I could get behind.

The weekend concluded with that hotbed of opinions on swimming: the city meet. At this annual event, parents from neighborhoods across the tri-county area gather to watch their little summer leaguers compete against each other. Bragging rights are at stake, but opinions – both about year-round and summer league programs – are pretty inflexible, regardless of outcomes. I hemmed and hawed about going, ultimately deciding against it. Instead, I stayed home and continued poring over Gary Hall’s book and working on a season plan for the fall. At practice the next day, our team mom told me I really don’t do that much, and regarding my level of commitment to next season, she said, “We’ll see.” I wonder if she thinks the whole world smells like her own farts.