Is Swimming Eating Its Young?

Some Guy, I have a few beliefs that I think are important here. In no particular order: 1) Children should progress with children of their same age. A fast 12 year old should not train with 17 and 18 year olds no matter how fast he/she is. Maturity level of the swimmers needs to be the same and the coach should not have to try to speak to multiple levels of age appropriate intellects. 2) Children up to about the age of 10 to 12 should do more than one sport even if one is done more than the other. you don't know what they will really like or what they will excel at later in life. 3) The amount of time spent on any give sport/hobby/interest (music included) should be age appropriate. No 8 year old should be doing any one thing (non-school) more than 2 or 3 hours a week including travel time. The time can increase with age as interest increases but it has to be appropriate for the maturity of the mind and body. Freshman in high school should not be doing doubles during the school year. Juniors might do it once or twice. Seniors twice a week. On the mental side, this is important because too many kids will begin to measure themselves by what they do with this time (in this case we are talking swimming) and they need to be more than single dimensional people. 4) Parents need to look at this before they join a swim team if they have more than one option. In any case, they need to let the team know that this is what they believe up front so that there are no surprises later. I believe that much of what I said above is consistent with the teaching of both USA Swimming and the American Swim Coaches Association. Many coaches choose to ignore this or forget it so they have to be reminded. My wife coached in St Louis for 21 years before we moved this summer. She coached the youngest kids in a series of groups whose goal was to take someone who could swim the length safely and have them swim a legal 100 IM. The team is large - 500 kids - and her groups probably totaled 100+. The kids ranged, generally, from 5 to 11 with the bulk being in the 6 to 9 range. She would come home on occasion with stories of parents who wanted to have their kid swim more than the twice a week that was available. (The practices were 30 minutes long for the youngest to 45 minutes for the oldest groups and they were segregated by age.) Kids could move out of the group when they made the 100 IM and they were old enough (7?) but the amount of practice time did not triple when they did (more was offered for convenience sake but you were not expected to come to all practices). I tell you this so that you know that there are programs out there that do it right. We lost kids to other teams because of this. For example, a couple of parents wanted all of their kids (age range of maybe 5 years) swimming together at the same time. The team was unwilling to do that. So they were gone. No great loss since we had hundreds more who saw that the program worked and it got to the point that we were running out of room at the top (skill/age) end of the team. Leo

Some Guy, I have a few beliefs that I think are important here. In no particular order: 1) Children should progress with children of their same age. A fast 12 year old should not train with 17 and 18 year olds no matter how fast he/she is. Maturity level of the swimmers needs to be the same and the coach should not have to try to speak to multiple levels of age appropriate intellects. 2) Children up to about the age of 10 to 12 should do more than one sport even if one is done more than the other. you don't know what they will really like or what they will excel at later in life. 3) The amount of time spent on any give sport/hobby/interest (music included) should be age appropriate. No 8 year old should be doing any one thing (non-school) more than 2 or 3 hours a week including travel time. The time can increase with age as interest increases but it has to be appropriate for the maturity of the mind and body. Freshman in high school should not be doing doubles during the school year. Juniors might do it once or twice. Seniors twice a week. On the mental side, this is important because too many kids will begin to measure themselves by what they do with this time (in this case we are talking swimming) and they need to be more than single dimensional people. 4) Parents need to look at this before they join a swim team if they have more than one option. In any case, they need to let the team know that this is what they believe up front so that there are no surprises later. I believe that much of what I said above is consistent with the teaching of both USA Swimming and the American Swim Coaches Association. Many coaches choose to ignore this or forget it so they have to be reminded. My wife coached in St Louis for 21 years before we moved this summer. She coached the youngest kids in a series of groups whose goal was to take someone who could swim the length safely and have them swim a legal 100 IM. The team is large - 500 kids - and her groups probably totaled 100+. The kids ranged, generally, from 5 to 11 with the bulk being in the 6 to 9 range. She would come home on occasion with stories of parents who wanted to have their kid swim more than the twice a week that was available. (The practices were 30 minutes long for the youngest to 45 minutes for the oldest groups and they were segregated by age.) Kids could move out of the group when they made the 100 IM and they were old enough (7?) but the amount of practice time did not triple when they did (more was offered for convenience sake but you were not expected to come to all practices). I tell you this so that you know that there are programs out there that do it right. We lost kids to other teams because of this. For example, a couple of parents wanted all of their kids (age range of maybe 5 years) swimming together at the same time. The team was unwilling to do that. So they were gone. No great loss since we had hundreds more who saw that the program worked and it got to the point that we were running out of room at the top (skill/age) end of the team. Leo