Having recently completed a trip abroad, I’m struck once again by how small the swimming world is. Even in Sweden, with nominally a completely different group of coaches than you would find at your average gathering of American swim coaches, connections abounded.
There are many benefits to a small community. One which I continually benefit from is that by virtue of that community being small, my modest presence online nevertheless affords me a lot of familiarity on many pool decks world wide.
In order to explain a particular downside, I’ll bring it to you via a small swimming world connection I made in a previous era of this blog. In my early days one of my obsessions was exceptional results coming out of tiny areas.
So it was I began writing about the story of Pal Joensen, a Faroese swimmer who emerged from the tiny archipelago of 50,000 or so people to be an international medalist in the 1500m free. I bonded with his coach, Jon Bjarnason, who I spent some time with when he attended the 2012 dual in the pool, and who provided some inspiration for my taking a coaching job in Denmark.
Something that Jon told me about growing up in the Faroes is very applicable to the world of swimming. He said that in a small community, your reputation for good or bad tends to crystallize early. He had, as many young men are wont to do, been a bit of a hot head in his youth. There was little he could do but accept that some people just thought of him as a hot head for life.
Reputational Heuristics
We all live in a world that our brain cannot hope to process on a daily basis. There is simply too much by an order of nearly infinite magnitude to rationalize in any given day. Thus our brain creates short cuts for us that allow us to continue on with life and not spend all day, every day, paralyzed considering all the variables.
In social situations, one such short cut is to decide our opinion on people despite having absolutely no personal interaction with people. I call this a reputational heuristic. Essentially, instead of making up our mind about a person ourselves, we rely on what people around us, most likely people we trust, have supplied.
On any given day, within the swimming community, I am aware of people that I am predisposed to think I don’t like, but without any actual personal reason for doing so. That is, I don’t actually know them at all. I have just, for lack of a better description, heard that they are “bad”.
One of the inherent flaws of this is that you are never getting unbiased information from any source, even (and especially) trusted friends. Yes, perhaps their dislike for a person might more likely than not translate into a similar sentiment from you.
Or it might not. When I rebooted Chris DeSantis coaching in 2023, one of the first teams I visited was Queens University. Head coach Jeff Dugdale quickly told me “you’re in business now, you can’t have enemies”. I disagreed at the time and I still do, but I’ll concede something.
One should never have more enemies than absolutely necessary. And whenever you can avoid it you should open your mind and give someone a shot. In so doing, disprove your very untested thesis that someone is an antagonist in your life.
Furthermore, it’s worth resisting the urge to simply categorize some people as bad. It feels righteous, it satisfies a certain primal urge but it’s ultimately self-defeating. That is because you may think that there are certain people out there who are not deserving of empathy, but denying that to them ultimately rebounds to a lack of self-empathy as well.
So to that end, I’m ticking off a few people on my list of those I find myself against but can’t come up with any personal reason why. Check back for updates.