High School Meets as USA Coach

Over the next few weeks a lot of us coaches who only coach USA will have the rare experience of attending meets as spectators. For me this is one of the most absolute nerve wrecking thing that I can do, sitting on the bleachers watching my swimmers swim there events without being able to interact with the before or after is an extremely strange experience.

But I feel like this experience helps us understand a little bit more what parents feels like when they are spectating and having conversations with us about the expectations they have for their kids and what they want out of clubs.

While I enjoy sitting in the stands having a conversations with my club parents and seemingly being in a lower stress environment, on the inside I am extremely anxious thinking “Do they remember what splits we are going for”, “Did they warm up the correct yardage or were they just messing around”, “Will they remember we are trying to kick further off the walls this race”.

What I have learned from this, it is much easier to be in control. We are in control of practices, warm up, yardage, what they are wearing on deck, the strategy of the race, when that is taken away from us as a coach it is extremely difficult.

I like being responsible, I like being the one who can take the blame if things go wrong, and will give them all the credit if things go right. But that high school coach who coaches 3 other sports and only sees them once a week and cares more about points then times isn’t giving them the same experience and I am always nervous that it is going to push them slowly away from the sport or from High School Swimming. This is not to say that all high school coaches are like this, and those who also coach club teams are in my experience almost always more accommodating and of a similar mindset to me.

In the end, putting faith into someone else when it comes to our swimmers is and will always be one of the most difficult things in coaching.

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