Sporting memories: Nearly achieving excellence in swimming

I was extremely athletic as a youth through my early 20's. I was encouraged from a young age to participate in every sport that I could and my parents really went above and beyond the call of duty to keep all of their kids involved in all sorts of sports. While my entire family participated in various sports including my father who was running marathons well into his 40's, I was the only one that really took to swimming. My other siblings had a go at it, but never really were competitors. Because of the way that I naturally started swimming with the "frog kick" I ended up excelling at breaststroke even as a pre-teen. I would blow away the competition in races once I was on a team, and I was discovered by a coach in a public pool one day when friends and I were having self-organized races. I was swimming faster than the kids that were doing freestyle with my breaststroke. If you know anything about the various strokes, breaststroke is one of the slower ones.

From that day forward I was on a swim team and just kept winning even though the coaching I had was rather substandard.

I still got 1st place in almost every meet that our team participated in, even though our team lost almost all of them because we had so few members and again, substandard coaching. I don't recall a single time that my stroke was at all improved by the coaches, they just told me to swim more laps and I got better at it on my own.

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As i progressed through high school it became apparent that I was taking on too many sports so my sophomore year was the last year I would participate in competitive swimming. I still had the same rather terrible coach yet because for some reason I was just gifted in breaststroke I kept winning tournament after tournament until i was in the finals for the state that I lived in at the time.

The competition went well, and I finished 2nd in my heat and if you don't know what a "heat" is it's kind of like a bracket system for other sports because they can't fit all the competitors in the pool at the same time. You whittle down the competition until you can fit everyone into the pool in one race to decide them all. There are substantial breaks in between.

While I enjoyed the fact that I was in the state championships for this, I never really took it seriously and just kind of saw it as a side sport to pass the time between soccer and football seasons. We practiced but my stroke was never refined.

I wrote about this before so I will keep it brief: It was my own fault that I didn't do better than I did in my heat because I was basing my own pace on the speed of the people around me rather than just going as hard as I could. I was also wasting energy looking around to see if anyone was near me. These were mistakes that a good coach would have coached out of me. While I finished 2nd in my heat I probably could have finished first if I hadn't been looking around so much and instead had focused on my breathing and getting my strokes as perfect as possible.

Finishing 2nd in your heat doesn't mean jack shit unless you go faster than the people in the other heats and this is why you should NEVER focus on the people around you when you are competing. Hell, the guy who finished 1st in my heat ended up in the same place as I did on the 2nd race and I ended up finishing before him on that one. When it was finally down to the final 12 competitors we had two races and this is where I would be eliminated. I finished 11th out of the 12 and I can specifically recall where I went wrong. I was once again looking around and when I noticed 2 people ahead of me I started pulling my strokes faster which I now know after being told by an opposing team's coach that precise strokes are much more important than how fast you can pull them. Looking back this is obvious information but this is what happens when you have someone who is gifted but with the wrong coach.

I was eliminated in my first and only state-wide event. I would never return to competitive swimming from that day forward.

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Watching the swimming in the Olympics the past week or so makes me wonder how good I could have been if I had decided to focus on this sport and also had access to really good coaches. I mean, I was already the 11th best swimmer in breaststroke in the U-19 division in the entire state with a garbage coach and only halfway focusing on it. How good could have I been if I had joined up with a good coach and fully focused on that?

There is no reason to obsess about things that you cannot change that happened 20 years ago but I will always wonder. I mean, I was likely top 200 in the U-19 in USA without really even trying. How well could have I done if someone had intervened and helped me to achieve greatness?

I suppose I probably would have gone the route that I went anyway even if I did have good coaches because I was much more excited about football of the soccer kind than I was in individual sports but every time the Olympics come around I just think to myself: Could that have been me?