Across the United States, in fits and starts, swimmers are returning to the water. Not here, in my home state of New Jersey, of course. Nor are they seemingly anywhere closer in my other home country, Denmark.
As we return, though, a lot of standing hypotheses about what is important for swimming (and youth sports in general) will be tested. Without this interruption, it would have been much harder to challenge these myths.
Sport is particularly vulnerable to mythical thinking. The thing I love most about coaching- that the primary modality for learning is not a classroom but work itself- can also promulgate terrible ideas. Cross that with the fact that coaches are still primarily evaluated on the basis of their athletes’ results, and you get a fertile environment for the sky being green and the sun rising in the west.
The following are five myths that I think will be much harder to maintain in our new era. I’m not saying they will disappear, that would be too much to hope for. But they will be much more vulnerable than they have been for quite some time.
Myth 1: Most swimmers need to train year round to improve
Please note that I am not saying that there are not some athletes who truly need to maintain a year round training environment to get some scant improvement to their swimming ability. But hundreds of thousands of swimmers around the world effectively train 48 or more weeks out of the year, in some part out of the belief that this is what’s necessary to improve.
The truth of the matter first is that pubescent athletes should almost always get better with barely any training at all, and even beyond that few swimmers are practicing at a level of precision and attention to detail that necessitate grinding it out year round.
I swam on a college team with MANY MANY teammates who did not set foot in a pool from March-October every year, and then received below mediocre coaching for a few months, then nevertheless improved year in, year out.
Myth 2: Swim Teams are for training swimmers
Bear with me while i explain this one a bit. Without the ability to practice, many young athletes have done a pretty great job keeping themselves active and fit. Many also saw this as a natural part of the team they are on. It turns out, of course, that you are not paying for group training.
Take it from someone who pays a decent amount for group fitness classes- your average swim team should charge more for what they are providing and educate their parents and swimmers about what they actually offer. The training is part of it, to be sure, but is actually secondary to, y’know, the actual coaching.
Some coaches have been exposed as trainers and not coaches- those whose contribution during the time at home consisted mainly of sending dryland workouts. True coaches were able to provide a lot for the families they work with, even without being in the same place.
Myth 3: Waking Teens (or adults even) at an obscenely early time makes sense
I can’t tell you how many athletes and coaches I have spoken to during this time that have told me they are sleeping one, two or even three hours more a night once life slowed down.
There couldn’t be a more obvious, blaring alarm bell that these people were beyond an exhaustion point prior to this. Most of them were routinely waking up well before they naturally would to do training early in the morning.
It makes absolutely no sense to me to interrupt people’s natural recovery to TRAIN MORE.
Myth 4: Kids are Getting Harder to Coach
I have lost count of the number of articles I’ve read about how “kids these days” and their awful parents are driving coaches out of the sport.
What I’ve seen talking to athletes during this time is that they have incredible capabilities to manage themselves, and were often being over-scheduled and structured. That they have natural optimism in the face of deeply challenging situations that often leave adults in despair.
And believe me, as a parent myself I think many parents have gotten a much better appreciation for what other adults who spend a lot of time with their kids are dealing with.
Myth 5: It Makes Sense to Have Paying Members You Ignore
I can remember how old I was when somebody first told me about the concept of “the money lane”. For the uninitiated, a “money lane” is a group of swimmers that pay dues to a club but effectively not coached. They are ignored with the hope that their dues subsidize the other swimmers on the team.
Swimmers can earn their way into a “money lane” by either being deemed competitively not good enough, or “not hard working enough”, or in some cases their poor attendance is relied on for lane spacing reasons.
As teams begin to resume with lane space extremely limited by social distancing, it makes even less sense than it did before to make any space for people you aren’t even planning on trying to coach. Teams cannot afford that waste of space, particularly if they have to increase dues to stay alive business wise with less bodies in the pool.
Don’t be Russian
Many well-meaning swim coaches (and Mark Schubert) were in a big rush to get “back to normal” in this crisis. I think that’s a mistake. Although this has been an extremely trying time, the coaches and athletes who find the opportunity for big change and growth through this will come out the other end thriving.