It is interesting to hear the point of view of a parent who has been through it. Watched their children develop and experience our crazy world of competitive swimming. The observation that the worst thing about Youth Sports being parents is a generalization. As a coach, you do see the parent who feels like they need to say something to the child, or the parent who thinks that they need to repeat what the coach says. You see the parents who video tape their kids and then analyze the race with them. You see the parents that get worked up over the awards because they need them to fill that section of awards at the home.
It is not all parents though. Some parents do just allow the kids to participate. Allow them to just race and enjoy that moment. It is not about time standards or awards. Obviously this is not every parent as Aaron's mother seems to have not been an over active parent. I remember hearing Kohlton Norys' mother talk about the same things, as she talked about being a swim parent to some TNT parents (Kohlton being one of the most successful TNT swimmers as a NCAA champion and a Team USA representative for the University Games).
I think back about my upbringing in swimming. My brother and I would make little places for our awards when we younger, but we eventually had to clean them up and put them away. By about 11 years old I really stopped collecting the ribbons. I got to the point that both my brother and I just threw them away before even leaving the pool deck. It was a little different for us though. Our summer league had an evening meet from 5:00pm - 10:00pm every Tuesday and Thursday night for 4 weeks straight. We participated since 6 and 7, so the ribbons just added up. Add the ribbons from the USA Swimming meets, and we learned very early on that ribbons were kind of silly.
My father was a senior coach, he was too busy with his own swimmers to really analyze anything of our swimming until we were in his senior group. He never told me or my brother much about swimming until we were in his group. We reported to who ever was our coach at the time (Mark, Dennis, Pokey, Bill, Heidi, Phil, and others that I can't seem to remember all their names).
My mother coached us from time to time when we were age-groupers, but was always more of spectator and fan of us. I think my mom was just happy that we wanted to swim. She'd bring my step dad to meets and laugh at him as he tried to really get into it. I think she spent more time trying to explain things to him than worry about how we swam. She saw us having a good time, and as a former swimmer, she understood the importance of that for us.
I can say that my swimming career belonged to me from the very beginning. In the end, it was hard to deal with it being over because it belonged to me so much. I remember deciding to not pursue college swimming because of my time at Junior College I had fallen in love with coaching. It was hard to make the phone calls to the college coaches who had been watching me since I was a senior in high school to let them know that I was choosing to not pursue college swimming. The battle in my mind about the decision was hard, but I knew the decision was mine alone, as it had always belonged to me. I am thankful that I was able to own my swimming, as I think I learned more from it, and I really grew to love it. Where I saw many others who swam against me grow to resent swimming because it wasn't theirs, but their parents. I didn't understand it at the time; I didn't get how somebody could grow to hate a sport before they even get out of high school, but now as I have coached club swimming for almost 12 years now I can see how it can happen.
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