Swimming Lesson #1: Grumpy Isn't Always Good

Emily is a late bloomer. Not that she isn’t a fast swimmer, she just hasn’t gone as fast as a number of her peers. That’s okay. I was a late bloomer, so late that I was nearly 18 years old when I made my first Junior National cut but within the next three years I was on the U.S. National Team representing the stars and stripes on the international stage. It is okay to be a late bloomer. But it does one no good if the swimmer loses patience and opts to try something else.

So my goal has always been to keep Emily interested and to get her motivated! But motivating a ten year-old can be a difficult prospect, especially when she likes to kick breaststroke instead of every other stroke and when she stops every couple of hundreds to fix her goggles. Oh, those goggles! Eventually motivation gives way to frustration and not only is Emily stopping more often, kicking breaststroke more often, or cheating at butterfly more often, she feels like it is pointless because the other girls are so much faster. And me? I forget that I’m a 6’3” tall, 240 pound monster on the pool deck to these kids and I just get…FRUSTRATED, which to a little kid probably looks mad.

In Emily’s eyes I didn’t seem mad, I just seemed grumpy. I learned this when I stopped her one day and asked her, “Emily, what in the world can I do to get you to stop cheating and to really try to make the interval?” She looked at me square in the eyes and told me, “You can stop being so grumpy all the time.”

So I made her a promise. I told Emily that I’d stop being grumpy, for now, but she had to do something on her end. She had to make an effort. And not what she thought was an effort, but what I would think was an effort. She had to work hard, get tired, and push herself.

It wasn’t easy. I mean, for me, the coach, it really wasn’t easy. Because at first she’d still stop and fix her goggles every 400 or so. And she’d still kick breaststroke during freestyle kick sets. But after one or two times of reminding her that I was purposefully not getting grumpy with her something changed. Emily decided to lead a lane. Not only that, she led a lane one day when we were doing 20 x 100 freestyle on what was, for them, a tough interval. In her case the interval was 1:40, not blazing for a kid that age by any means, but for her a big step. And she made them. Every single one. Not only that, she kept count and sent herself off on time on each and every repeat.

I didn’t notice it but I’d start saying, “Good job, Emily!” And this resonated, as I learned, because her mom came up to me a few days later and said that Emily had been counting the “Good Jobs” and she’d gotten four the night before.

Sometimes it’s easy to stand on deck and assume that just because you say something the kids should do it. I mean they should, shouldn’t they? That’s why they are there in the first place. But sometimes, at least in my case, I have to remind myself to stop and talk to the swimmer. It could be a soon to be graduating senior who is having trouble staying motivated his last few weeks in high school, or a blond, lithe ten year-old girl who has the ability to move through the water with fluid beauty and the capacity to stop if she thinks she killed a fly with her foot during a flip turn. At the end of the day it does matter why a child will do what we ask and why they won’t. Sometimes we just have to take the time to ask them. The answer may well be illuminating in its simplicity.

Because grumpy can sometimes be a very bad thing.