The Raging Elitist

The mother of a sometimes-lazy ten-year-old girl recently asked me on deck what she’s supposed to say to motivate her daughter. I think she was a little surprised when I was quick to respond, shrugging my shoulders and suggesting “Just don’t say anything.”

The child is no world-beater. She has a little talent, but she also has a lot of less-than-ideal practice habits, like loafing into the wall, doing somersaults mid-pool, and skipping repeats when sets get challenging. Unlike most of the other kids in her group, she’s unmoved by my enthusiastic urging on deck. The mother is frustrated, because she’d like to see her girl capitalize more on her ability. Her daughter apparently tells her that she’s “saving herself for the meets” and that her mother “doesn’t understand,” which I find beautifully ironic. She’s right about her mom, but not the way she thinks she is. You can’t “understand” swimming until you’ve stared down the barrel of a three-thousand-yard threshold set with a goal in your heart and really wondered if you’re good enough. This little girl certainly hasn’t done that, and that’s a good thing. If she stays in the sport, she’ll have plenty of time to grapple with its hard lessons about effort. Anything her mother has to say on that topic will likely breed nothing but resentment.

As a swim parent, I have quite the opposite problem as this particular mother. My nine-year-old swims in my group, one lane over from her girl, and he has no such trouble with loafing. He swims with a collection of high achievers that can perform aerobic sets of six hundred to twelve-hundred yards with their little hearts pounding in their chests like jackhammers. Sometimes, after an especially good day, I gather him and his teammates on the deck and tell them things like, “You guys swim outside your comfort zone, and that’s why you’re real athletes. You can take that home with you and be proud.” I consider it part of my job as a coach to make the kids feel big, to let them know that to me, they’re impressive. I’ve always enjoyed that aspect of coaching, and when I look out at the group and see my son hanging on my every word, I enjoy it to the point that I’m nearly frightened. The boy loves me. Being both his year-round swim coach and his father is no small responsibility.

In some ways, Cartter’s eagerness to please me makes him easier to coach. He executes drills consistently, makes technical corrections quickly, and takes tips on race strategy to heart. I have no trouble reaching him whether it’s during practice or a meet. On day one of his last meet, he came over to where I stood in a row of coaches after what’s currently his best event, the 50 back, thrilled to have swum his first ever ‘A’ time. He’d gone :37.0, and a modicum of celebration and high fiving with teammates transpired. I praised him for his turn and his underwaters and told him, “That’s how you have to go out in the hundred.” He looked me right in the eye, and I saw the wheels turning. It wasn’t a three-thousand-yard threshold set I was presenting him, but it was a challenge, and I know it scared him. Swimming, and fathers, do that to people.

Keeping in mind the outsized impact I have on my young son’s psyche, I try, as a rule, not to talk to him about swimming when we’re away from the pool. It’s a policy I adopted from another coach whom I met at a meet when Cartter was one year old. He was coaching his son and his team to much success, and when I asked him if managing the coach/son relationship got complicated, he said, “We leave it at the pool.”  Eight years later, his advice rings truer than ever, but it’s not always easy to follow.

There are times when I get home from coaching my older group, when I find Cartter sitting at the kitchen table finishing dinner or doing his homework and I want to tell him how proud I am of the good practice he had. Other times, I want to probe his mind and ask what he thought about a particular set or exercise. Then, of course, there are the times when Cartter has questions of his own.

The night after his 50 back, he called into his room after bedtime. He was lying in the dark thinking about what I’d told him during that afternoon’s session, unable to fall asleep. He looked up at me from his pillow and said, “Tomorrow’s the hundred back.”

“Uh huh,” I said, leaning over his bedrail.

“What if I go thirty-seven/thirty-nine?” he said, referring to 50 split times.

“That would be awesome,” I said, knowing there was a follow-up, wondering what it might be. Like I enjoy making my swimmers feel big, I also enjoy when my son reminds me what it’s like to be small. Children are by nature more philosophical than adults. Everything is so new to them. They don’t have trouble getting to the fundamental questions.

“What would happen?” Cartter asked.

I laughed. It’s not every time that I know exactly what to say, but this was one such occasion. I never want my son to think my love depends on swimming. It’s why I don’t praise him for his performance at practice in those moments when I get home and find him in the kitchen. He needs me to be the same whether he succeeds or fails, so when he asked me, scared, in the dark of his room, what would happen if he swam a perfect hundred back the next day, I told him the truth: “Nothing.”