The time that I progressed the most

Again, this is more for coaches, but may interesting to others.

The period of time that I progressed as a coach the most was very early on. My brother and I were both coaches, as we both are still today. In the summer, he'd come home and coach the Summer League Team that I was Head Coaching. Summer League in the Central Valley is crazy. You have the swimmers for about 2 to 3 weeks. Club swimmers wouldn't come to Summer League Team practices, but they'd compete at meets. These practices were crazy. All these kids not knowing much about swimming, and others who have swam summer after summer. The Season would then start, and we'd have meets that went from 5:00pm to after 10:00pm. This would be every Tuesday and Thursday night. Practice was only Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

My brother and I one summer would drive home from these meets that ended at 10:00pm, grab dinner on the way home at a drive thru, and get home around 11:30pm - Midnight. We'd hang out and talk about our summer league swimmers. We'd review many of the performances and our opinions on how they could get better. We'd talk about the club swimmers also. We'd figure things out many times, and we'd argue with each other. We both had opinions, and we were both hard headed and were willing to argue with each other. Funny, we either came up with solutions or we finished with the belief that we were just going to disagree. Either way we ended the argument we walked away with another perspective that we could think about later. We'd finally go to bed around 1:00am or 2:00am, only to wake up at around 6:00am to drive to morning workout for the club swimmers.

When my brother returned home we were able to argue even more. The schedule wasn't so crazy, but we'd still have plenty of time to argue and chat about swimming. My perspective on swimming changed a lot, even his perspective changed. We both grew to realize the value that each of us had to give to one another, even though our worlds in swimming were so different.

Going from Central California to Southern California has allowed me to progress even more. I learn different things by observing my fellow coaches and other team coaches. Dealing with swimmers in this cut throat environment. I feel bad for them sometimes because of how the entry point is so difficult down here. The things that I learned early on in discussions and arguments have been huge for me to accept that things can be different, yet you can adapt to make it work. Open-mindedness. That was what helped my brother and I develop, even though we were willing to make the counter point at times.

His world has changed as well, going from NAIA to NCAA Division 1. I know he is still developing and learning on his journey. Still talking and at times arguing, but using each other to continue to grow is now a habit for us, and as our worlds have now grown, we can probably again have that great time of progression as coaches.