The Raging Elitist

Amid all the millions of yards of training and the focus on goal times and personal records, the true nature of our sport often gets lost. Ultimately, swimmers are racers, and racers want to touch the wall first. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement, except there is a lot of energy spent trying to distract age groupers from the obvious competitive situation in which they find themselves each time they share a lane in practice or line up behind the blocks in a meet. Only one kid can lead the lane or finish first, and nobody wants the others to be discouraged, so we push time standards and goal sheets. We tell them not to focus on the other kids in the heat sheet, not to worry about what place they get. We think they can’t handle losing; we guard against their quitting. In doing so, we sometimes miss the point of playing sports: trying to measure up against the competition makes everyone better.

The professed goals of two ten-year-old boys led me to write this essay. My coaching colleague captured them on video at a recent meet, and she used the clip to conclude a vlog she made for social media. In it, the boys, best friends, stand next to each other at the end of warm-ups. They’re each wearing a jammer, and one is holding a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The coach asks from behind the camera, “What’s the goal for today?” Neither child can stand still. They sway back and forth, smiling, leaning on one foot and then the other. The one with the pb&j says, “To do the best we can.” The other, ringing out his towel anxiously, nods and says, “To win.”

By no means do I want to dismiss the goal of doing one’s best. Some might view it in the same light as the participation trophy, but truly doing one’s best is at least as difficult as winning; ever sought after, ever elusive, the moments of self-discovery that swimmers achieve through striving for their best might be the biggest reason I love coaching. Two nights before my colleague recorded the aforementioned video, I was lucky enough to witness such a moment when a fourteen-year-old girl in my group started her meet off with the 1,000.

A hard worker who transferred at the beginning of the season, she’d gone a full year without making significant gains, and she was champing at the bit for a breakthrough swim. Her fear and excitement heading into that first night were so palpable that I cautioned her repeatedly to stay under control at the outset of her race. She did, even when the swimmers in the lanes surrounding her went out too fast. In the end she reeled them in, and when she looked up at the scoreboard and saw she’d dropped thirty seconds, her face lit up with surprise. “Coach John,” she said once she walked over to me, “That was like, the best thing ever! . . . I felt like I was gonna puke!” She made a AAA time and qualified for sectionals. She got sixth overall in the event, but in the sense that she surpassed what she thought were her limits, she won.

The meet was more emotionally fraught for the young boy whose goal was explicitly “to win.” A ten-year-old barely three months into his year-round career, this child was competing at a level few ever reach: he broke six team records over two days, finishing in the top two of every event he swam; in the 100 IM, he went faster than any ten-year-old I’ve ever coached in my decade and a half of experience, a feat that was marvelous to behold, but one that left him utterly disappointed – the 100 IM happened to be the event he had a mind to win that day. After touching second, he rounded the deck toward the team bleachers, and his eyes welled with tears. He’d made a furious effort and dropped four seconds (over 5%) from the team record he set a few weeks prior, but instead of the sweet elation experienced by his older teammate following the 1,000, his was the bitterness of failure. I found him still hanging his head several minutes later and had two bits of wisdom to offer: “It’s gonna happen sometimes,” and “Next race.” He got up and dropped five seconds (7%) in the 100 free, in the process crushing the boy who beat him in the 100 IM. Out of trying and failing to win came perseverance and success.

Of course, not everyone on the team was dropping thirty seconds at a time, swimming AAA times, and finishing at the top of their events. That doesn’t mean they weren’t trying to do their best, though, nor does it mean they weren’t trying to win. Even further down the results  list, the opportunity to do both exists. I was particularly pleased to watch the friendly, odd-couple sort of rivalry my nine-year-old son Cartter has with a boy who swims in his lane at practice. The boy is a year older than Cartter, and a whole head taller. They swim nothing alike, yet they go nearly identical times in almost everything. At this most recent meet, before reporting to the blocks for the 50 back, the bigger boy looked at me, motioned to Cartter with his thumb, and said with smirking earnestness, “I’m gonna beat him.” Cartter just stood there grinning.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s pretty tough to beat,” and with that the two of them walked off side by side toward the starting blocks, Cartter’s teammate towering over him. Cartter beat him by about a second, and after the race, they walked up to me laughing. Rather than be distressed by the competition that exists between them, they’re brought together by it. They’re friends because of it.

What a wasted opportunity it would be not to appreciate one’s competition, to think that one’s best exists in a vacuum absent the efforts of others. When I look back on my swim career, I’m proud of the times when I approached my “best,” and I was lucky to score a few victories, but when I try to explain my experience to other people, the most important part of the story is always the great athletes I swam against. If I could go back, I’d try to be less jealous of those swimmers who were better than I and to celebrate their achievements more. I imagine that approach would have made my time training and competing in the pool much more enjoyable, and that probably, I would have swum faster. In my adulthood, I’m thankful that for now, my two children seem to get it way better than I ever did. I asked them after our December meet what their favorite part was. They were sitting next to each other at the kitchen table, and my seven-year-old glanced sideways at his brother and smiled knowingly. Their favorite part of the meet was the same. It was when their teammate, the boy from the video, won first place.