Green Group:
Lifetime Best Time(s): R Jatar, J Purdy, J McGuire, C Chernow, G Wheeler, W Wright, A Elhamahmy, W Dillard, K Cheng, A Reid-Martin, C Ng, C Hughes
First Time Swim(s): R Jatar, J Purdy, C Chernow, A Elhamahmy, W Dillard, K Cheng, A Reid-Martin, C Ng, C Hughes
Gold Group:
Lifetime Best Swim(s): N Shields, B Fadjariza-Dumais, M Young, M Dillard, M Rotolo, C Staley, D Hall, Y Smith, M Johnson, S Humphrey, N Rotolo, B Brownell, M Fennelly
First Time Swim(s): M Rotolo, M Young, D Hall, Y Smith, C Staley, N Rotolo, B Brownell, M Fennelly
USA Swimming "B" Time Standard(s): M Young, N Shields, B Fadjariza-Dumais, D Hall, Y Smith, D Hall, M Rotolo, M Johnson
USA Swimming "BB" Time Standard(s): B Fadjariza-Dumais, N Shields, Y Smith
Age Group 3
Lifetime Best Swim(s): JR Hull, C LaMastra, J Shields, J McGuire, C Marwitz, C Perry, M Swett, N Bent, R Viersen, G Sherman, K Yao, H Robison, R Bentz, T Lauterbach, C Gantt, J von Biberstein, I Ariail, L Adams, M Williams, C Tappero, K McGrady, M McJilton
First Time Swim(s): C LaMastra, J Shields, N Bent, R Viersen, H Robison, N Bent, K Yao, R Bentz, T Lauterbach, M Williams
USA Swimming "B" Time Standard(s): JR Hull, J Shields, K Yao, J von Biberstein, T Lauterbach, K McGrady, L Adams, C Tappero
USA Swimming "BB" Time Standard(s): C Perry, H Robison, R Bentz, J von Biberstein, C Gantt, C Tappero, G Sherman
New Age Group State Cut(s):
Caleb Perry – 100 Breast, 100 Fly, 100 Back, 500 Free
Matthew Swett - 100 Back
Hannah Robison – 100 Fly, 100 Back
Raleigh Bentz – 100 Fly, 100 Breast, 100 Back
USA Swimming "A" Time Standard(s): J McGuire, C Marwitz, C Perry
Age Group Sectional Cut(s):
James McGuire – 100 Breast
Caleb Perry – 100 Fly
USA Swimming "AA" Time Standard: C Perry
Wes – DQ 50 Breast – started free
Alex E – DQ 50 Breast - kick
Kaleigh Mc- 200 IM – back/back/back
C Tappero – 100 fly – simultaneous arms (last 25 tired)
N Rotolo – 50 Breast – 1 hand touch
N Bent – 100 back – turn non simultaneous, 200 Free???
Total DQs all three groups - 5 - lowest number in any meet!
Total State Cuts/Goals Age Group 3 - This Does Not include Swimmers/cuts from this summer that do count towards the short course states as long as they do not age up!
Number of cuts/Group Goal --> 76/130
Number of swimmers with a cut/ group goal --> 14/25
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Parent and Coach...The Other Stuff
I found this article from USA Swimming to be interesting. One of the most important relationships to help you swimmer is the one between coach and parent. There needs to be communication, patience, and some understanding. Any coach you will encounter, including myself, wants the same thing you do - what is best for your swimmer. Remember that emergencies and the big stuff - please call me. If you have random questions (what time does the meet start, what time is practice) or even the general how is my swimmer doing in practice - then e-mail me. Please trust that I will get back to you as soon as I can, I try not to let more than a day or two to go by on things that may require more thought - but your swimmer is important to me and so are you.
Parent and Coach...The Other Stuff
Coaching is about more than athletes, practices, and competition. As Mike Krzyzewski, Duke's hugely successful basketball coach said, it's also about "the other stuff." For coaches of club teams, that means parents.
By Tom Slear, Splash Magazine special correspondent
“All that craziness,” is how Monica Teuscher describes the rituals of other parents who nervously follow their children’s swimming development. Teuscher, mother of Cristina, a 1996 and 2000 Olympian, never owned a stopwatch and rarely bought a meet program. She didn’t track her daughter’s times, yell during her races, or seek out her coach after practices for private chats. During swim meets, she went off by herself to read or knit, only to be amused when other parents gave her a rundown on Cristina's swims, complete with split times.
"I thought it was important that I was there, but for support, not for coaching or to add pressure," Teuscher explains. "My job was to take my daughters (older daughter Carolina also swam) out for a good meal after they raced. The last thing we talked about was swimming."
Most coaches would agree that the best team to coach is one filled with parents such as Teuscher, who recognize the line between parenting and coaching and avoid it as if it were radioactive. They somehow manage to counterbalance their staunch support with a refreshing cluelessness.
Years ago Debbie Phelps, mother of Michael, the world record-holder in the 200-meter butterfly, relocated the family so that her children would be closer to North Baltimore Aquatic Club’s practice facility. Yet when asked about Michael’s world record time, she can do no better than to say, “I’m not sure – 1:50 something?” (Actually, 1:54.58)
"The swimmers I've had who have had the most success were unencumbered by parents calling the shots behind the scenes," says John Collins, who has coached Olympians Rick Carey and Lea Loveless as well as Cristina Teuscher at the Badger Swim Club in Larchmont, N.Y. "These parents are very good about backing up their kids, but they are hands off when it comes to swimming business."
The Growing Intrusion of Parents
Most coaches will tell you that Teuscher and Phelps are hardly exceptions. The overwhelming majority of parents instinctively, or with gentle guidance, find their place in the background. A few, however, can’t resist meddling, such as the mother who wrote Collins a five- or six-page letter every week for a year and a half. Rare is the swim coach who doesn’t have a similar story to tell.
"So many," says Chuck Warner, the head coach at Rutgers University who coached club teams for years before entering the college ranks. "All filed away in a painful spot."
The effect of such parents is all out of proportion to their numbers. A survey by Dan Doyle, which will be published in his forthcoming book, The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting, found that high school coaches across different sports are convinced that the biggest change in their profession over the last 15 years has been the growing intrusion of parents.
"No other factor they mentioned even came close," says Doyle, the executive director of the Institute for International Sport.
The top issues raised when the development coordinators for USA Swimming solicit opinions from club coaches are "parent education" and "club governance," euphemisms for the difficulty of dealing with parents, whether individually or as members of the club's board of directors. (The coach-board relationship will be covered in a future issue of Splash.)
An Oasis
But a bit of perspective is in order here. While all coaches labor to properly shape the parent-athlete-coach triangle, some suffer more than others. Rick Wolff, chairman of the Center for Sports Parenting (www.internationalsport.com/csp), calls swimming "an oasis."
Coaches of team sports have only subjective means to evaluate talent. Even at its best, the process is imprecise and open to question. How does a coach fix with any certainty which offensive lineman blocks better, or which outfielder offers the best combination of hitting and fielding?
Yet these judgements determine playing time, which is at the root of nearly all parental complaints. Coaches are forced to defend themselves armed with nothing stronger than an arbitrary standard. Who’s to say a guard with a deft shooting touch should play more than a tenacious defender?
With swimming the only standard is time, so performance is entirely quantifiable, measured precisely by a stopwatch. And playing time is rarely an issue. The only barrier to entry at most age-group meets is the entry fee. Everyone who wants to swim can compete.
“When you compare what coaches of team sports have to put up with when they make decisions about who makes the team and who plays, coaches of individual sports like swimming and track are not even in deep water as far as their problems with parents,” says Doyle. “They are barely in three feet of water.”
Swimming's preciseness, however, comes with a price. In sports such as soccer and basketball, parents can judge their children’s potential only against the players they compete against, which typically stretches no farther than adjacent counties. Not until the last two or three years of high school do they step onto a stage that provides statewide or national exposure.
Swimming, on the other hand, allows comparison between a 10-year-old breaststroker in Pennsylvania to one in California right down to the hundredth of a second. The temptation for parents to extrapolate is irresistible. If a son or daughter is among the Top 16 when they are 10, shouldn't they be in the running for a national championship when they turn 18?
In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Improvement is not a steady, positive slope, especially for prodigies. A study by USA Swimming using the All-Time Top100 swims in each age group through 1996 found that only 10 percent of the Top 100 10-and-Unders maintained their status through age 18. Only half of the swimmers among the Top 100 in the 17-18 age group had made any top-100 list when they were younger.
"Those winning races at 10 probably won't be winning races when they are 20," says John Leonard, the executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association. "This is one of those things that is obvious to coaches but is a mystery to parents. Coaches understand the long-term nature of the sport, parents often don't."
This misunderstanding creates swimming's equivalent of playing-time disputes. As swimmers begin to slip in national, regional, and even local rankings, their parents scramble for solutions. Sue Anderson, a former world record-holder and one of USA Swimming's development coordinators, saw the pattern repeat itself many times when she was head coach of the Scarlet Aquatic Club in New Jersey during the 1990s. These "pressure parents," as she calls them, begin to micromanage their children's swimming by arranging for extra practices and seeking out meets not on the team's schedule. When expectations still aren't met, they invariably blame the coach, who is mostly defenseless because no one can say for sure why young, talented swimmers stop improving. Maybe it is the coach's fault, though the problem just as likely could stem from the swimmer's early physical maturation or a mindset that has become mis-wired because of parental pressure, or a host of other reasons. Regardless, the conflict heats up until the swimmer jumps to another club, which is often the first of several such moves.
"What the parents think is helping their kids is only putting them under a lot of pressure," says Anderson. "Many of these kids do very well when they are 10-and-under and 11-12, but eventually a lot them they stop living up to expectations, and they fall apart."
The Other Stuff
Of course, not all disputes fall under the category of domineering parents and underachieving swimmers (though they tend to be the most intractable). A coach's personal style can cause problems, particularly if he focuses almost exclusively on the senior swimmers. There is also the matter of different outlooks. Parents see only their sons and daughters and the next few weeks and months. Coaches see the entire team and the upcoming years. Then there's the issue of how coaches are viewed. Many parents don't see a professional, but a former jock slumming between real jobs.
"It was amazing how differently parents acted when I started coaching at the college level," says Warner. "I knew nothing more than when I was coaching a club team, but the parents assumed that I did."
Mike Krzyzewski, who, over the last 20 years at Duke has established himself as one of the most successful college basketball coaches ever, once said, "The coaching I love. The kids I love. It’s the other stuff you have to watch out for."
What often matters to parents is the other stuff, whether coaches are returning their phone calls promptly or thanking them for their volunteer work on behalf of the club. These small courtesies seem insignificant by themselves, but when taken together they acknowledge that the coach is meeting the parents halfway. They also keep disputes to a minimum. A meticulous plan handed out in March for the summer season will inhibit parents from overlapping family vacations with major competitions. Regular parent meetings run by the coaches and board members that both inform and educate will minimize rumors and alleviate concerns over the cyclic nature of competitive swimming. Set office hours for the coach will discourage interruptions from parents during practice.
The biggest courtesy of all, Leonard believes, is listening. A handful of parents are unreasonable. Others simply have healthy concerns about what's best for their children. Separating the two requires more than a five-minute conversation.
To make his point, Leonard refers back to his first coaching job, which was in Illinois during the 1970s. The father of a talented girl initially gave off all the signs of trouble.
"The classic horror story of a parent," Leonard recalls. "He was a trial attorney. Very pushy. His style of conversation was confrontational."
Yet Leonard endured and gradually came to realize that despite the father's bluster, he had a lot to offer. After two years, they were running together. Leonard would talk about his new ideas and the father would poke holes in all of the right spots.
"He'd question me on everything I was doing, which gave me a lot to think about," Leonard says. "Our relationship lasted for eight years and the daughter represented the United States on national teams. The mother and the father were the most active parents in helping to run the club. They were the best swimming parents I have ever known. It took me a while, but I discovered they were only interested in the best possible experiences for their daughter – both in life and in swimming – and they wanted to learn all they could about the sport.
"It just took a little bit of willingness to understand what they were after, and a little bit of patience to give them the opportunity to do the right thing."
Good advice, both for coaches and parents.
Parent and Coach...The Other Stuff
Coaching is about more than athletes, practices, and competition. As Mike Krzyzewski, Duke's hugely successful basketball coach said, it's also about "the other stuff." For coaches of club teams, that means parents.
By Tom Slear, Splash Magazine special correspondent
“All that craziness,” is how Monica Teuscher describes the rituals of other parents who nervously follow their children’s swimming development. Teuscher, mother of Cristina, a 1996 and 2000 Olympian, never owned a stopwatch and rarely bought a meet program. She didn’t track her daughter’s times, yell during her races, or seek out her coach after practices for private chats. During swim meets, she went off by herself to read or knit, only to be amused when other parents gave her a rundown on Cristina's swims, complete with split times.
"I thought it was important that I was there, but for support, not for coaching or to add pressure," Teuscher explains. "My job was to take my daughters (older daughter Carolina also swam) out for a good meal after they raced. The last thing we talked about was swimming."
Most coaches would agree that the best team to coach is one filled with parents such as Teuscher, who recognize the line between parenting and coaching and avoid it as if it were radioactive. They somehow manage to counterbalance their staunch support with a refreshing cluelessness.
Years ago Debbie Phelps, mother of Michael, the world record-holder in the 200-meter butterfly, relocated the family so that her children would be closer to North Baltimore Aquatic Club’s practice facility. Yet when asked about Michael’s world record time, she can do no better than to say, “I’m not sure – 1:50 something?” (Actually, 1:54.58)
"The swimmers I've had who have had the most success were unencumbered by parents calling the shots behind the scenes," says John Collins, who has coached Olympians Rick Carey and Lea Loveless as well as Cristina Teuscher at the Badger Swim Club in Larchmont, N.Y. "These parents are very good about backing up their kids, but they are hands off when it comes to swimming business."
The Growing Intrusion of Parents
Most coaches will tell you that Teuscher and Phelps are hardly exceptions. The overwhelming majority of parents instinctively, or with gentle guidance, find their place in the background. A few, however, can’t resist meddling, such as the mother who wrote Collins a five- or six-page letter every week for a year and a half. Rare is the swim coach who doesn’t have a similar story to tell.
"So many," says Chuck Warner, the head coach at Rutgers University who coached club teams for years before entering the college ranks. "All filed away in a painful spot."
The effect of such parents is all out of proportion to their numbers. A survey by Dan Doyle, which will be published in his forthcoming book, The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting, found that high school coaches across different sports are convinced that the biggest change in their profession over the last 15 years has been the growing intrusion of parents.
"No other factor they mentioned even came close," says Doyle, the executive director of the Institute for International Sport.
The top issues raised when the development coordinators for USA Swimming solicit opinions from club coaches are "parent education" and "club governance," euphemisms for the difficulty of dealing with parents, whether individually or as members of the club's board of directors. (The coach-board relationship will be covered in a future issue of Splash.)
An Oasis
But a bit of perspective is in order here. While all coaches labor to properly shape the parent-athlete-coach triangle, some suffer more than others. Rick Wolff, chairman of the Center for Sports Parenting (www.internationalsport.com/csp), calls swimming "an oasis."
Coaches of team sports have only subjective means to evaluate talent. Even at its best, the process is imprecise and open to question. How does a coach fix with any certainty which offensive lineman blocks better, or which outfielder offers the best combination of hitting and fielding?
Yet these judgements determine playing time, which is at the root of nearly all parental complaints. Coaches are forced to defend themselves armed with nothing stronger than an arbitrary standard. Who’s to say a guard with a deft shooting touch should play more than a tenacious defender?
With swimming the only standard is time, so performance is entirely quantifiable, measured precisely by a stopwatch. And playing time is rarely an issue. The only barrier to entry at most age-group meets is the entry fee. Everyone who wants to swim can compete.
“When you compare what coaches of team sports have to put up with when they make decisions about who makes the team and who plays, coaches of individual sports like swimming and track are not even in deep water as far as their problems with parents,” says Doyle. “They are barely in three feet of water.”
Swimming's preciseness, however, comes with a price. In sports such as soccer and basketball, parents can judge their children’s potential only against the players they compete against, which typically stretches no farther than adjacent counties. Not until the last two or three years of high school do they step onto a stage that provides statewide or national exposure.
Swimming, on the other hand, allows comparison between a 10-year-old breaststroker in Pennsylvania to one in California right down to the hundredth of a second. The temptation for parents to extrapolate is irresistible. If a son or daughter is among the Top 16 when they are 10, shouldn't they be in the running for a national championship when they turn 18?
In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Improvement is not a steady, positive slope, especially for prodigies. A study by USA Swimming using the All-Time Top100 swims in each age group through 1996 found that only 10 percent of the Top 100 10-and-Unders maintained their status through age 18. Only half of the swimmers among the Top 100 in the 17-18 age group had made any top-100 list when they were younger.
"Those winning races at 10 probably won't be winning races when they are 20," says John Leonard, the executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association. "This is one of those things that is obvious to coaches but is a mystery to parents. Coaches understand the long-term nature of the sport, parents often don't."
This misunderstanding creates swimming's equivalent of playing-time disputes. As swimmers begin to slip in national, regional, and even local rankings, their parents scramble for solutions. Sue Anderson, a former world record-holder and one of USA Swimming's development coordinators, saw the pattern repeat itself many times when she was head coach of the Scarlet Aquatic Club in New Jersey during the 1990s. These "pressure parents," as she calls them, begin to micromanage their children's swimming by arranging for extra practices and seeking out meets not on the team's schedule. When expectations still aren't met, they invariably blame the coach, who is mostly defenseless because no one can say for sure why young, talented swimmers stop improving. Maybe it is the coach's fault, though the problem just as likely could stem from the swimmer's early physical maturation or a mindset that has become mis-wired because of parental pressure, or a host of other reasons. Regardless, the conflict heats up until the swimmer jumps to another club, which is often the first of several such moves.
"What the parents think is helping their kids is only putting them under a lot of pressure," says Anderson. "Many of these kids do very well when they are 10-and-under and 11-12, but eventually a lot them they stop living up to expectations, and they fall apart."
The Other Stuff
Of course, not all disputes fall under the category of domineering parents and underachieving swimmers (though they tend to be the most intractable). A coach's personal style can cause problems, particularly if he focuses almost exclusively on the senior swimmers. There is also the matter of different outlooks. Parents see only their sons and daughters and the next few weeks and months. Coaches see the entire team and the upcoming years. Then there's the issue of how coaches are viewed. Many parents don't see a professional, but a former jock slumming between real jobs.
"It was amazing how differently parents acted when I started coaching at the college level," says Warner. "I knew nothing more than when I was coaching a club team, but the parents assumed that I did."
Mike Krzyzewski, who, over the last 20 years at Duke has established himself as one of the most successful college basketball coaches ever, once said, "The coaching I love. The kids I love. It’s the other stuff you have to watch out for."
What often matters to parents is the other stuff, whether coaches are returning their phone calls promptly or thanking them for their volunteer work on behalf of the club. These small courtesies seem insignificant by themselves, but when taken together they acknowledge that the coach is meeting the parents halfway. They also keep disputes to a minimum. A meticulous plan handed out in March for the summer season will inhibit parents from overlapping family vacations with major competitions. Regular parent meetings run by the coaches and board members that both inform and educate will minimize rumors and alleviate concerns over the cyclic nature of competitive swimming. Set office hours for the coach will discourage interruptions from parents during practice.
The biggest courtesy of all, Leonard believes, is listening. A handful of parents are unreasonable. Others simply have healthy concerns about what's best for their children. Separating the two requires more than a five-minute conversation.
To make his point, Leonard refers back to his first coaching job, which was in Illinois during the 1970s. The father of a talented girl initially gave off all the signs of trouble.
"The classic horror story of a parent," Leonard recalls. "He was a trial attorney. Very pushy. His style of conversation was confrontational."
Yet Leonard endured and gradually came to realize that despite the father's bluster, he had a lot to offer. After two years, they were running together. Leonard would talk about his new ideas and the father would poke holes in all of the right spots.
"He'd question me on everything I was doing, which gave me a lot to think about," Leonard says. "Our relationship lasted for eight years and the daughter represented the United States on national teams. The mother and the father were the most active parents in helping to run the club. They were the best swimming parents I have ever known. It took me a while, but I discovered they were only interested in the best possible experiences for their daughter – both in life and in swimming – and they wanted to learn all they could about the sport.
"It just took a little bit of willingness to understand what they were after, and a little bit of patience to give them the opportunity to do the right thing."
Good advice, both for coaches and parents.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Age Group Development
The following link will take you to a short article that describes why we coach our 10 & Unders like we do. Though my AG3 swimmers ay come home excited because they finally reached x amount of yards in practice - the quality of that work always means more to me than the total amount we did. Right now, we are doing a great job of making changes and producing quality work at practice - something you should be proud of with your swimmer(s)!
http://www.floridaswimming.org/PAR/PAR%20Dev%20p14.pdf
http://www.floridaswimming.org/PAR/PAR%20Dev%20p14.pdf
Monday, October 12, 2009
A Letter to Swim Parents Pt 3 - How Kids Work
A great series of articles written by Michael Brooks from NBAC. He brings up some good points in this one.
HOW KIDS WORK
KIDS are inconsistent. There is nothing that any coach or parent can do to change that. A ten-year old swimmer who knows better will in the pressure of a meet do a flip-turn on breaststroke. Another young swimmer will take twenty seconds off her best time in a race this week, and next week add it all back, with interest. One week it will seem that the butterfly is mastered, and the next week that we’ve never even been introduced to the stroke. A senior swimmer will take ten seconds off her best time one race, then an hour later add ten seconds in her next race. It’s enough to make your hair turn grey. Learn to expect it and even to enjoy it.
SO you thought she was a backstroker. Age groupers change favorite or “best” strokes
approximately every other day. A stroke will “click” suddenly, and then later just as suddenly unclick. There is no explanation for this phenomenon. A stroke the child hated becomes her favorite by virtue of her having done well at yesterday’s meet. These are good arguments for having kids swim all four strokes in practice and meets, and for not allowing early specialization.
NO cookie-cutter swimmers. Kids learn at different rates and in different ways. One swimmer
picks up the breaststroke kick in a day; it takes another swimmer a year to master the same skill. If you pay close attention, you could probably write a treatise on motor learning after watching just one practice of novice swimmers. Be careful of comparing your swimmer to others, and especially be careful of comparing your swimmer to others in her hearing. Never never never measure the continuing success of your child by his performance against a particular competitor, who is likely to be on a completely different biological timetable from your child. Doing so makes you either despondent or arrogant.
WHY doesn’t he look like Ian Thorpe? Little kids are not strong enough or coordinated enough
for their strokes to look like the senior swimmers, no matter how many drills they do or how many repeats. And parents shouldn’t stress about a little thing that a swimmer struggles with for a time, such as a proper breaststroke kick. Kids seem to get these things when they are ready, and not until. We are winning the game if they steadily improve their motor control, steadily improve their aerobic conditioning, and steadily improve their attitudes. They will look like the Thorpedo soon enough.
HOW they do versus what they do. Especially at younger ages, how fast a child swims and how
well he places in a meet have little significance for how that swimmer will do as a senior. Many
national caliber athletes were not at all noteworthy as ten year olds. Competition times and places often tell you not about the amount of swimming talent a child has, but about how early a developer he is. What is truly important in determining future swimming success is what happens everyday in practice: Is he developing skills and technique? Is he internalizing the attitudes of a champion? Is he gradually building an aerobic base and building for the future? The work done is cumulative, with every practice adding a grain of sand to what will eventually become a mountain.
TIMES are the least of our worries. Many young swimmers spaz out when they swim, especially
at meets when they race. But you learn technique and control best at slow speeds. Don’t rush, take it slow, and get it perfect before you try to go fast. Even in meets, for the little ones I am much more interested in how they get down the pool than in how fast they do. Technique and tactics are more important than the numbers on the watch; if the technique and tactics are improving steadily, the time on the watch will improve steadily, too, and without our obsessing over it.
BUT he swam faster in practice!?!? Younger kids are routinely swimming as fast in practice as
they do in meets. From one perspective, this makes no sense. Why should a swimmer do better on the last repeat of 10 x 400 on short rest, after having swum 3600 meters at descending pace, than she does when all she has to do is get up and race one rested 400? She swims faster when she’s tired? Sometimes, yes. After all, in training she is well warmed up, her body has run through the spectrum and swum faster and faster, so her aerobic systems are working at full steam and her stroke rhythm is perfect and grooved, and she is energized from racing her teammates and shooting after concrete goals without the pressure she often feels in meets. Practice is much less threatening than meets.
NOT even Ted Williams batted a thousand. No one improves every time out. Don’t expect best
times every swim; if you do, you will frustrate yourself to death in less than a season, and you will put so much pressure on your swimmer that she will quit the sport early. You would think that if a swimmer goes to practice, works hard, and has good coaching and a good program, then constant improvement would be inevitable. Wrong. So much more goes into swimming than just swimming.
THE Rubber band effect. It would be easier for the swimmer, his parents, and his coach if
improvements were made slowly and gradually, if all involved could count on hard work in practice producing corresponding improvements in competition every month. This “ideal”, however, is so rare as to be nonexistent. Often improvements are made in leaps, not baby steps. Improvement happens by fits and starts, mostly because improvement results as much from psychology as from physiology. It is harder this way, because less predictable. Further, swimmers and their parents tend to become a bit discouraged during the short “plateaus” when the improvements that the child is making are not obvious; then, when the rubber band has snapped and the swimmer makes a long awaited breakthrough, they expect the nearly vertical improvement curve to continue, which it will not do. Fortunately, because our program emphasizes aerobic training, the long plateaus common in sprint programs are rare here.
THERE is a lot more to swimming than just swimming. This will become especially apparent as
the swimmer gets older, say around puberty. But even for the young kids, inconsistency is the rule. What’s going on in a swimmer’s head can either dovetail with the training or completely counteract the hours and hours in the pool. Again, if a swimmer has been staying up late, not allowing her body to recover from training, or if she’s been forsaking her mother’s nutritious meals for BigMacs, fries and shakes, that swimmer’s “hidden training” will counteract what she’s been doing in the water. Again, if a swimmer is in the dumps and can’t see straight after breaking up with his girlfriend, the best coach and the best program in the world will not save today’s race.
TERMINAL strokes and “coachability”. Often young swimmers, especially “successful” younger
swimmers who are very strong for their age, have terminal strokes – i.e., strokes that are inefficient dead-ends, strokes that will not allow for much if any improvement, strokes that consist of bulling through the water and not getting much for the huge outpouring of effort and energy. For kids with terminal strokes, it is time to throw away the stopwatch, slow down, and learn to swim all over again. Often this adjustment period is characterized by slower times, which is difficult for the swimmer and for the parents. Difficult, but necessary, because this one step backwards will allow for ten steps forward soon enough.
Note that for the stroke improvement to be made, the swimmer (and parent, supporting the coach’s decision) must be coachable: they must trust that the coach is knowledgeable and thinking of the swimmer’s best interests, and they must be willing to trust that the changes that feel awful at first (because the swimmer’s body is used to doing things a certain way, that way feels comfortable, and any other way is going to be resisted) will help him be a better swimmer. This coachability, this trust, is unfortunately rare. Most kids choose not to change horses in the middle of the stream, and both the horse and rider drown. Terminal strokers are soon caught by swimmers who are smaller but more efficient.
BIGGER is better?? The subject of early and late bloomers is a sensitive one, but nonetheless very important for parents to understand. Early and late bloomers each have “virtues” and “challenges.”
To begin with early developers. They get bigger and stronger earlier than the other kids, which means they are more likely to win their races. That early success is the virtue. However, because they can often win without having to work on their technique or train very hard, often they do not develop a solid work ethic, and often their technique is poor as they bull through the water. Note that from the child’s immediate perspective, NOT working hard and NOT working on technique is a rational choice. After all, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”: what he has done has obviously been working, since he has been highly successful, so why should he listen to the coach tell him that he needs to work harder or change his stroke? He beats all the other kids who listen to the coach, work harder, and change their strokes! So our pragmatist reaches the ages of thirteen to fifteen and suddenly the other kids whom he used to destroy in meets are catching up to him and even passing him. The size and strength advantage that he had relied on has deserted him, and he has no technique or work ethic to fall back on. He is not long for the sport: many early bloomers quit when their easy successes dry up. We avoid this future problem by not allowing the early bloomers to bask in the temporary limelight, but training them for their long run benefit, and educating them about how they should judge their own performances both
in meets and in practices.
On to the late bloomers. They are smaller and weaker than the others, so they get crushed in
swimming meets. If the coach, swimmer, and parent emphasize places and winning, then there is
little chance that this late bloomer will stay in the sport. This, too, is rational: “Why should I keep
swimming? I’m obviously lousy, even though I’m working my guts out and doing everything the
coach asks. I’m still getting killed! Coach is a bozo and I’m just not meant to be a swimmer.”
That is the obvious downside. However, if the coach and parents can help the swimmer find enough rewards from swimming, for instance improvement, meeting personal challenges, friendships, etc., to stick it out through the lean years, and if she relies on technique and hard work to overcome the temporary physical deficit, then she is in the driver’s seat in a few years. It is usually the case that the late bloomers end up bigger and stronger than the others – it just takes them longer to get there. And the qualities in the water and in their heads serve them well in senior swimming.
Note well: it is almost impossible to tell how talented your swimmer is, or how much potential your swimmer has for swimming, by looking at 10 & Under meet results. Races will often just tell you who is bigger and stronger, and that probably won’t last.
PUBERTY complicates everything. You would think that because they are getting bigger and
presumably stronger, your swimmers would be getting faster. Yes, and no. Whether fair or not, in the end puberty is highly beneficial to almost all boys, but with girls can be more ambiguous. Boys lose fat and gain muscle, getting bigger and stronger; girls, too, gain in height and strength, but they also add fat deposits. With proper nutrition (that does not mean starvation diets or eating disorders) and proper training (lots and lots of aerobic work, consistently), these questionable changes can be kept to a minimum, with no long-term harmful effects. In the short run, during puberty kids are growing, but they are growing unevenly. Arms and legs and
torsos don’t have the same proportions as they did last week, either of strength or length, so
coordination can go haywire. Strokes may fall apart, or come and go. Also, various psychological
changes are affecting swimming and everything else. Interests change and priorities are re-ordered. All these changes can cause the child’s athletic performances to stagnate. It can be a highly frustrating time for all involved. Fortunately, it doesn’t last long, and the swimmer emerges from a chrysalis a beautiful (and fast and strong) butterfly.
THE perils of getting older. Aging up is sometimes traumatic. Formerly very good ten year olds
become mediocre 11 & 12’s overnight. And often, the better they were in the younger age group, and the higher their expectations of success, the more traumatic the change is for them, because the more their “perceived competence” has suddenly nose-dived as they now race against bigger and stronger and faster competition. They are bonsais racing sequoia trees, and the standards of judgement have ratcheted up dramatically. The fastest kids are much faster than they are, to the point that they think they cannot compete, so they figure, “Why try? Working hard isn’t going to get me far, anyway. I may as well wait until my ‘good year.’” Often we see a tremendous jump upwards in practice intensity as swimmers approach their last meet in an age group (they want to go out with a bang), then a tremendous plummeting in that intensity as they become just one of the pack. This is in despite of the coach’s discussing the matter with the swimmer.
HOW KIDS WORK
KIDS are inconsistent. There is nothing that any coach or parent can do to change that. A ten-year old swimmer who knows better will in the pressure of a meet do a flip-turn on breaststroke. Another young swimmer will take twenty seconds off her best time in a race this week, and next week add it all back, with interest. One week it will seem that the butterfly is mastered, and the next week that we’ve never even been introduced to the stroke. A senior swimmer will take ten seconds off her best time one race, then an hour later add ten seconds in her next race. It’s enough to make your hair turn grey. Learn to expect it and even to enjoy it.
SO you thought she was a backstroker. Age groupers change favorite or “best” strokes
approximately every other day. A stroke will “click” suddenly, and then later just as suddenly unclick. There is no explanation for this phenomenon. A stroke the child hated becomes her favorite by virtue of her having done well at yesterday’s meet. These are good arguments for having kids swim all four strokes in practice and meets, and for not allowing early specialization.
NO cookie-cutter swimmers. Kids learn at different rates and in different ways. One swimmer
picks up the breaststroke kick in a day; it takes another swimmer a year to master the same skill. If you pay close attention, you could probably write a treatise on motor learning after watching just one practice of novice swimmers. Be careful of comparing your swimmer to others, and especially be careful of comparing your swimmer to others in her hearing. Never never never measure the continuing success of your child by his performance against a particular competitor, who is likely to be on a completely different biological timetable from your child. Doing so makes you either despondent or arrogant.
WHY doesn’t he look like Ian Thorpe? Little kids are not strong enough or coordinated enough
for their strokes to look like the senior swimmers, no matter how many drills they do or how many repeats. And parents shouldn’t stress about a little thing that a swimmer struggles with for a time, such as a proper breaststroke kick. Kids seem to get these things when they are ready, and not until. We are winning the game if they steadily improve their motor control, steadily improve their aerobic conditioning, and steadily improve their attitudes. They will look like the Thorpedo soon enough.
HOW they do versus what they do. Especially at younger ages, how fast a child swims and how
well he places in a meet have little significance for how that swimmer will do as a senior. Many
national caliber athletes were not at all noteworthy as ten year olds. Competition times and places often tell you not about the amount of swimming talent a child has, but about how early a developer he is. What is truly important in determining future swimming success is what happens everyday in practice: Is he developing skills and technique? Is he internalizing the attitudes of a champion? Is he gradually building an aerobic base and building for the future? The work done is cumulative, with every practice adding a grain of sand to what will eventually become a mountain.
TIMES are the least of our worries. Many young swimmers spaz out when they swim, especially
at meets when they race. But you learn technique and control best at slow speeds. Don’t rush, take it slow, and get it perfect before you try to go fast. Even in meets, for the little ones I am much more interested in how they get down the pool than in how fast they do. Technique and tactics are more important than the numbers on the watch; if the technique and tactics are improving steadily, the time on the watch will improve steadily, too, and without our obsessing over it.
BUT he swam faster in practice!?!? Younger kids are routinely swimming as fast in practice as
they do in meets. From one perspective, this makes no sense. Why should a swimmer do better on the last repeat of 10 x 400 on short rest, after having swum 3600 meters at descending pace, than she does when all she has to do is get up and race one rested 400? She swims faster when she’s tired? Sometimes, yes. After all, in training she is well warmed up, her body has run through the spectrum and swum faster and faster, so her aerobic systems are working at full steam and her stroke rhythm is perfect and grooved, and she is energized from racing her teammates and shooting after concrete goals without the pressure she often feels in meets. Practice is much less threatening than meets.
NOT even Ted Williams batted a thousand. No one improves every time out. Don’t expect best
times every swim; if you do, you will frustrate yourself to death in less than a season, and you will put so much pressure on your swimmer that she will quit the sport early. You would think that if a swimmer goes to practice, works hard, and has good coaching and a good program, then constant improvement would be inevitable. Wrong. So much more goes into swimming than just swimming.
THE Rubber band effect. It would be easier for the swimmer, his parents, and his coach if
improvements were made slowly and gradually, if all involved could count on hard work in practice producing corresponding improvements in competition every month. This “ideal”, however, is so rare as to be nonexistent. Often improvements are made in leaps, not baby steps. Improvement happens by fits and starts, mostly because improvement results as much from psychology as from physiology. It is harder this way, because less predictable. Further, swimmers and their parents tend to become a bit discouraged during the short “plateaus” when the improvements that the child is making are not obvious; then, when the rubber band has snapped and the swimmer makes a long awaited breakthrough, they expect the nearly vertical improvement curve to continue, which it will not do. Fortunately, because our program emphasizes aerobic training, the long plateaus common in sprint programs are rare here.
THERE is a lot more to swimming than just swimming. This will become especially apparent as
the swimmer gets older, say around puberty. But even for the young kids, inconsistency is the rule. What’s going on in a swimmer’s head can either dovetail with the training or completely counteract the hours and hours in the pool. Again, if a swimmer has been staying up late, not allowing her body to recover from training, or if she’s been forsaking her mother’s nutritious meals for BigMacs, fries and shakes, that swimmer’s “hidden training” will counteract what she’s been doing in the water. Again, if a swimmer is in the dumps and can’t see straight after breaking up with his girlfriend, the best coach and the best program in the world will not save today’s race.
TERMINAL strokes and “coachability”. Often young swimmers, especially “successful” younger
swimmers who are very strong for their age, have terminal strokes – i.e., strokes that are inefficient dead-ends, strokes that will not allow for much if any improvement, strokes that consist of bulling through the water and not getting much for the huge outpouring of effort and energy. For kids with terminal strokes, it is time to throw away the stopwatch, slow down, and learn to swim all over again. Often this adjustment period is characterized by slower times, which is difficult for the swimmer and for the parents. Difficult, but necessary, because this one step backwards will allow for ten steps forward soon enough.
Note that for the stroke improvement to be made, the swimmer (and parent, supporting the coach’s decision) must be coachable: they must trust that the coach is knowledgeable and thinking of the swimmer’s best interests, and they must be willing to trust that the changes that feel awful at first (because the swimmer’s body is used to doing things a certain way, that way feels comfortable, and any other way is going to be resisted) will help him be a better swimmer. This coachability, this trust, is unfortunately rare. Most kids choose not to change horses in the middle of the stream, and both the horse and rider drown. Terminal strokers are soon caught by swimmers who are smaller but more efficient.
BIGGER is better?? The subject of early and late bloomers is a sensitive one, but nonetheless very important for parents to understand. Early and late bloomers each have “virtues” and “challenges.”
To begin with early developers. They get bigger and stronger earlier than the other kids, which means they are more likely to win their races. That early success is the virtue. However, because they can often win without having to work on their technique or train very hard, often they do not develop a solid work ethic, and often their technique is poor as they bull through the water. Note that from the child’s immediate perspective, NOT working hard and NOT working on technique is a rational choice. After all, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”: what he has done has obviously been working, since he has been highly successful, so why should he listen to the coach tell him that he needs to work harder or change his stroke? He beats all the other kids who listen to the coach, work harder, and change their strokes! So our pragmatist reaches the ages of thirteen to fifteen and suddenly the other kids whom he used to destroy in meets are catching up to him and even passing him. The size and strength advantage that he had relied on has deserted him, and he has no technique or work ethic to fall back on. He is not long for the sport: many early bloomers quit when their easy successes dry up. We avoid this future problem by not allowing the early bloomers to bask in the temporary limelight, but training them for their long run benefit, and educating them about how they should judge their own performances both
in meets and in practices.
On to the late bloomers. They are smaller and weaker than the others, so they get crushed in
swimming meets. If the coach, swimmer, and parent emphasize places and winning, then there is
little chance that this late bloomer will stay in the sport. This, too, is rational: “Why should I keep
swimming? I’m obviously lousy, even though I’m working my guts out and doing everything the
coach asks. I’m still getting killed! Coach is a bozo and I’m just not meant to be a swimmer.”
That is the obvious downside. However, if the coach and parents can help the swimmer find enough rewards from swimming, for instance improvement, meeting personal challenges, friendships, etc., to stick it out through the lean years, and if she relies on technique and hard work to overcome the temporary physical deficit, then she is in the driver’s seat in a few years. It is usually the case that the late bloomers end up bigger and stronger than the others – it just takes them longer to get there. And the qualities in the water and in their heads serve them well in senior swimming.
Note well: it is almost impossible to tell how talented your swimmer is, or how much potential your swimmer has for swimming, by looking at 10 & Under meet results. Races will often just tell you who is bigger and stronger, and that probably won’t last.
PUBERTY complicates everything. You would think that because they are getting bigger and
presumably stronger, your swimmers would be getting faster. Yes, and no. Whether fair or not, in the end puberty is highly beneficial to almost all boys, but with girls can be more ambiguous. Boys lose fat and gain muscle, getting bigger and stronger; girls, too, gain in height and strength, but they also add fat deposits. With proper nutrition (that does not mean starvation diets or eating disorders) and proper training (lots and lots of aerobic work, consistently), these questionable changes can be kept to a minimum, with no long-term harmful effects. In the short run, during puberty kids are growing, but they are growing unevenly. Arms and legs and
torsos don’t have the same proportions as they did last week, either of strength or length, so
coordination can go haywire. Strokes may fall apart, or come and go. Also, various psychological
changes are affecting swimming and everything else. Interests change and priorities are re-ordered. All these changes can cause the child’s athletic performances to stagnate. It can be a highly frustrating time for all involved. Fortunately, it doesn’t last long, and the swimmer emerges from a chrysalis a beautiful (and fast and strong) butterfly.
THE perils of getting older. Aging up is sometimes traumatic. Formerly very good ten year olds
become mediocre 11 & 12’s overnight. And often, the better they were in the younger age group, and the higher their expectations of success, the more traumatic the change is for them, because the more their “perceived competence” has suddenly nose-dived as they now race against bigger and stronger and faster competition. They are bonsais racing sequoia trees, and the standards of judgement have ratcheted up dramatically. The fastest kids are much faster than they are, to the point that they think they cannot compete, so they figure, “Why try? Working hard isn’t going to get me far, anyway. I may as well wait until my ‘good year.’” Often we see a tremendous jump upwards in practice intensity as swimmers approach their last meet in an age group (they want to go out with a bang), then a tremendous plummeting in that intensity as they become just one of the pack. This is in despite of the coach’s discussing the matter with the swimmer.
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