The Raging Elitist

There’s a light that shines from behind the young coach’s eyes that inspires confidence and belief in his swimmers; they huddle around him after warm-ups and listen intently before belting out a cheer; they utter his name with reverence when they walk the deck chatting about race plans; between their events, they stand at the side of the pool watching each other and shouting encouragement – it’s what he requires. During open warm-ups before the finals session, the young coach sits behind lane 5 in a timer chair next to his assistant. His athletes have taken over the center three lanes in the long course pool and are busy churning the water to a boil with their aggressive strokes while he calmly watches from his spot beneath the big scoreboard. Besides his assistant, nobody else goes near him. His instructions are quick and few. The preparation is done; there’s little for him to say now. His boys stand out the most – tall, lean, and broad-backed – they look like muscly clones in white bathing caps when they stand in a mass behind the blocks, each waiting his turn to do a practice start. The coach stands among them, a short commanding presence amid the trees; he repeats stoically, “Take your mark, hup!” and his boys rocket through the air toward the water’s surface three at a time.

The team reminds me of the way MPSC used to look, and I’m eager to get to know the young coach. Over the course of the meet, I ask him about his training schedule; I ask him about his teen phenom who swam in the last Olympics; and I don’t mention the turmoil surrounding his program, the fact that his former boss was just handed a two-year probation for alleged emotional abuse of his swimmers. In the light shining from behind the young coach’s pale green eyes, I feel the pull of winning, and I remember my former MPSC boss Liz’s confession at the end of her coaching career: “I got to a pretty dark place.”

I was restless, distracted, and short-tempered in the week leading up to the meet. I snapped at the boys, Cartter in particular, when they fought, and considering how much time they’ve been spending around each other this summer, and their age, they hardly fight. “Cartter!” I yelled from the kitchen, “Come here!” and he reluctantly and fearfully produced himself from the bedroom where he’d been screaming at his brother. I stood in the walkway that spans the dining room and kitchen, and he stopped about ten feet short of me. I pointed at the floor in front of me and demanded, “Come Here!”

He said, “Okay,” as he stepped toward me, his voice breaking, his eyes filling with tears, not quite able to hold back a sob. Meet week is hard on everyone.

Danyelle stepped up to help the kids keep boredom at bay while I was distracted or unavailable; Cartter melted down anyway. She took him and Scotty bowling with their cousin Maddux and their friend Bennett, and when Cartter rolled the lowest score, he pouted. “I never wanna come here again,” he said. Then he acted silly at the restaurant when Danyelle took them all out to eat. I was at Thursday practice the next county over while all this happened. Half my team’s coaching staff was with a group of seniors at a meet in Florida, and I was left behind with the age groupers and part-time staffers, picking up slack, dreading the prospect of a three-day, eight-session meet, resenting everyone. Meanwhile, my son wanted my attention.

In the wake of Cartter’s early retirement from bowling, I talked to him about separating what’s important from what’s not. Our dog, Sammy made the important list, an inclusion which prompted Cartter to cry again. “I can’t say it,” he said when I asked him what was the matter, his voice like the whistle of a tea kettle, a sob about to burst out of him. “It’s too sad,” he wailed. He called me back to his bedroom that night and was so upset that I had to climb into his bed with him. “I can’t stop thinking about when Sammy dies,” he said.

Sammy’s arthritis continues to slow her down. We’ve tried everything to curb her decline; we even got surgery on her right elbow; but nothing seems to help much. She’s happy for now, but the writing is on the wall, and Cartter is smart enough to realize it. Once I awkwardly positioned myself in his bed, he had questions. “Did you have a dog?” he wanted to know. I guess he thinks that “having a dog” is something that happens in childhood, that Sammy is his dog, but maybe when I was a child, I had a dog too. “What did you do when it died?” he asked. Stuffed animals wedged me onto my side, and I looked up at the glowing plastic stars glued to Cartter’s ceiling. I told him I cried when my childhood dog died. “What will you do when Sammy dies?” he asked. I told him that when Sammy dies, I’m going to cry. “Like me?”

On meet day, I’m driven by a caffeinated sort of energy even though I don’t drink coffee. I can’t wait to get to the pool for warm-ups; once the heats get underway, kids come up to me dripping wet, wide-eyed and panting after spending themselves in the water; I show them their splits and critique their swims; I make jokes with the hospitality volunteers, and tell them, “I’m here for the food;” I go around talking to the other coaches, telling them I’m taking a poll and then picking their brains for tidbits about what they’re doing with their teams. Race after race goes by, the ten or fifteen seconds between one group’s final, desperate push for the wall and the next group’s adrenaline-soaked burst from the blocks enough to build a mountain of tension before every heat. Piercing whistles and cheers accompany each race after the starter horn sounds, but in those few seconds between heats, a hush echoes through the pool building while the swimmers nervously and compulsively press their goggles into their eye sockets. The referee’s long whistle signals them to step up, and from the stands comes a smattering of encouraging shouts. The swimmers take their marks; the horn sounds; and whoosh – they break the surface together; the meet with all its splashing cheering sound is reborn. Again. I cock my head to the side to get a better vantage point for viewing my swimmers’ technique; I walk the side and whistle to let them know I’m there, trying to will them to touch first; I record splits to the tenth of a second. Hours pass slowly this way, and when I rejoin the outside world, it’s as a time traveler who’s lived a year on the pool deck only to find that a mere three days have passed while I’ve been away. Afterwards, it will be like that weekend never happened. Out in the regular world again, if someone asks me what I did, I’ll forget the meet and tell them about the weekend before when I was with my family. Time bends, and collapses into meet week.

Cartter was relieved to have me back on Sunday. When he called me to his bedroom that night, he even laughed at himself. “You just want to talk,” I said, hugging him in the dark. He said he “bonked his tooth,” emphasizing that it was an adult tooth, and he claimed he was worried his teeth were going to fall out. I comforted him leaning over his bed rail, the one he gnawed on as a toddler when we switched him out of his crib, and he reminded me of when he used to push his blanket down to the foot of his bed and call me to his room: “Fix my blanket,” he’d say. Then, we said good night for the second time. We always say the same thing: “Night night I love you see you in the morning see you soon,” and then we blow kisses to each other.

On Monday, I took a couple phone calls from summer league parents who are interested in their kids joining the team. We did fine at the meet, but we didn’t win any events; if we’re going to build a winning program, we need more talent. To that end I let an acquaintance share my contact. Now, my phone number is making the rounds. The boys came out to year-round practice with me, and I worked to iron out some of the flaws that summer league swimming has creased into Cartter’s backstroke – a sloppy entry, an errant recovery on the left side. He was upset about people cutting down trees when he called me back to his room that night. I thought he was joking, but he burst into tears when I laughed: “Why would I be joking?” he said indignantly. My back was stiff from standing on the pool deck all weekend, and when I laid down in his bed, it was even more awkward and uncomfortable than when we talked about Sammy. I tried to explain that people need wood to build houses and make paper products, but Cartter was unmoved. He suggested that we could use bricks or metal; that way we could spare all the beautiful trees. “It’s not that easy,” I told him. “That stuff isn’t free. It takes a lot of energy to make. Everything costs.”