Penguins,
Swim meets are upon us and with it comes loads of tri-tip sandwiches and breakfast burritos, no wait I mean lots of fast races and tons of fun. Behind the scenes however is a lot of chaos. The coaches work day and night to develop the entries for the upcoming meet. Now because I am a coach I guess it is my duty to plug this into this article, it is very important to let the coaches know as early as possible if your child is not going to be at the meet, this has a huge impact on entries. A coach uses the number of swimmers to plan on what events to put kids in and more importantly who is on which relay. Now that I have done my duty as a coach I’ll get to the good part.
First we are in one of the best leagues in the area. Why? Is it the fastest? Most fun? While I can’t confirm or deny the last two I can tell you that this league includes everyone and not just the kids that can swim the fastest. If that was how our league operated then our team of 150 penguins would only need about 24 swimmers, because that’s all that would contribute to the scoring right? Instead our league embraces the fact that not everyone is the next Ryan Lochte or Missy Franklin. More importantly our league recognizes its main attribute that should revolve around all cabana swim teams, yes swimming is a competitive sport, but it can also be a very fun sport. A summer league should focus on fun first and foremost and then the competitive aspect after. So what does our league do differently? Our league takes a percentage of placement point and adds them to the percentage of improved swims. So to get technical for a second the placement points are established by taking a team’s total score and dividing it by a “perfect meet” (the total number of points a team can possibly score in an entire meet if they were to win every single event). This means that EVERYONE plays a part in scoring for the team.
So what is the purpose behind me revealing the secrets that go on “behind the scenes”? It’s quite simple, the purpose is to make everyone aware that every race counts. Countless times I have heard “I’m just going to swim slow because I’m not going to win.” Try on every race! Usually improvement points are what determine the end result of each meet.
One last thing swimmers, don’t forget that the coaches put countless hours into creating the events. It takes that long because each and every meet there is a strategy behind it, so yes sometimes you may have to swim your off strokes. I hate backstroke but I didn’t complain when the coaches put me in it.
In the end lets have some fun at our upcoming dual meets and lets swim every race with our all!
Until next week…
Coach Ryan