Swimming Vacation

Guest editorial by Chris DeSantis

ATLANTA, Georgia, August 18. MID-August is one of my least favorite times of the year. It's typically at this moment that there is a lull in the action. Just as with that brief sliver of April, there are no meets, very few, if any practices and everyone's using the dreaded B word. You know the one I'm talking about: break.

To me, a day not spent on the pool deck is akin to pulling teeth. Oh sure, I could go down by myself but it would be very lonely, and way less exciting. I mentioned my deep abiding mistrust of swimming breaks to a couple of my swimmers at dinner last night and the response was mixed: a chuckle and a few smirks. Surely, I couldn't be serious.

I believe this time of year offers an excellent chance to evaluate before you continue moving forward. It seems to me that many swimmers have come to accept certain things about swimming that I find abominable. They expect to dread practice. They will count down to their taper from the minute they get wet that first day. They will give you looks normally reserved for dog murderers and IRS agents when they see you at morning practice. Most importantly, they may never question why.

These are the type of swimmers that are always looking forward to a break. They relish the time when they don't have to labor in your Stalinist gulag. This begs the question to me; why are they swimming at all?

I don't mean to suggest that swimmers (or even coaches) with flagging motivation should quit. But if you're sitting here in the mid-August heat exalting in the fact that you don't have to be swimming, then there is something very wrong. While you can never make absolute generalizations, the vast majority of athletes in our sport are doing so voluntarily. It would seem then entirely at odds with a voluntary activity that people would treat it with so much dread. Even more shocking is the fact that many people do not seem to spend much time thinking about the fact that they are torturing themselves by voluntarily doing something that they do not enjoy.

I believe, and call me crazy, that athletes and coaches alike should look forward to coming to practice. It should be one of the best parts of their day: they should leave feeling energized and not beaten down. That is not to say that practice should not be hard: I believe most people enjoy working hard. In fact, the challenge level of a practice and the joy in completing it should travel on a consistent curve. Athletes want to know that the work they put in meant something.

If you haven't found this balance, it's a two-way street. As a coach, I've found the easy way out of this situation is to blame it on the athlete. Just tell everyone he/she isn't mentally tough enough, or tell them to get over it, or just demand that they have a positive attitude. Likewise, the path of least resistance for the athlete is to smugly maintain that their coach is ruining the experience for them. The answer almost always lies somewhere in the middle.

And if I find that answer, I'll be rich*

*in a purely figurative sense: I am a swim coach after all.

Chris DeSantis enters his first season at Georgia Tech as an assistant coach after previously coaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

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