Just finished a one day fun meet to begin the season. All of our swimmers did great. As a team, from the swimmers who had previous times we had over 93% improvement, and we had 83 swims be swimmers first time competing in an event. The swimmers seemed to have a great time, and I really enjoyed seeing my swimmers cheering on their teammates.
The group has developed so well, and the new swimmers have begun to adapt to the group, and I think have developed some speed just by swimming in the group. It says a lot about the idea of developing as a group. The leaders excel as they accept the leadership role, and the rest of the group does there best to keep up.
A new season brings new expectations. These are good and bad. Some begin the season not seeing the value of one's improvement as they thought there would be a bigger drop since the last time the swam a short course event. This is a real bad tendency. I hear parents make comments to their children about aspects of their strokes, or parts of their race. The parent doing their own analysis and giving their own criticism. The improvement is what I tell the kids to celebrate, and it is hard for them to celebrate when a parent is breathing down their neck about things done wrong. As a coach, we give them praise for a great race and point out a few things that we need to work on. Most of the time the kid nods and realizes that they've heard it practice before, as I use the same practice language when talking to them at meets for a quick analysis.
Always remember that the swimmer needs to enjoy the improvements, even if its only the one one-hundredth of a second. This should be despite the expectations of what the expectations of the season are for the swimmer. Enjoy the victories, ask most successful senior swimmers, the victories of personal bests don't come quite so often when they get to the higher level. Develop the mentality that every meet there should always be improvement, and that swimmer is in for a hard ride mentally as they grow older, when the improvement slows down, and they have to try to change their mentality just to prevent them to hate the sport.
A new season, and good results starting off this season. Most exceeded my expectations for this first meet, and I am even more excited about what is to come this season. The first meet was to show just where we were after some stroke work and doing some base conditioning. Barely touched some of the little details, but I have a much better idea of the detail work I need to emphasize on now though. A lot of work to do, but the beginning is looking pretty good.
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