Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Fishy, post: 3011649, member: 38"] Our 15-year old daughter is on a USA Swimming team. It's an operation - there are three full-time paid coaches and four or five other part-time coaches. Practice is six days a week, two hours a day. According to team guidelines, swimmers at my daughter's level are expected to attend practice six days a week. There are two seasons in swimming - short course and long course. Short course runs from late August through the last week of March. Then, there is a one-week break and long course begins and runs until the end of July. It is an 11-month season. And somewhere in the middle of all that, both boys and girls have a 12-week high school season where they are racing for two programs and practicing with one or the other. There's always friction between the two programs - the coaches all know each other and they are in competition for their swimmers. It really is more about the adults than it is about the kids. The coaches want more swimmers swimming more days and more meets and paying more fees. Some of the parents have allowed the team culture to become their social lives. Their kids come to every practice because that's when the parents get to hang with their friends. I am sure a lot of sports are the same, but a good number of swim parents get upset with their kid's progress and they burn a bridge with their current team and move to a new one. And then they do it again and again. We have one parent on our team who drives their two kids 90 minutes to and from practice every day because she alienated every swim program closer to her house. As parents, it's our job to make sure it doesn't get to be too much for our kid. (She's been in other sports, but actively disliked them - she isn't aggressive by nature and she hated every sport that involved a ball. And she violently dislikes running, which breaks my heart, but whatever.) She tells us if she's tired or if she has too much homework and we'll skip that practice. She generally goes four days a week. Once in a while she'll go five days, but it's much more likely that she goes three. We skip some meets if the travel looks to be more trouble than it's worth - she can't hit school on Monday morning more tired than she was when it ended Friday afternoon. And then we bail out before the end of long course. The long course championships are at the end of July - she prefers going to her grandparents house at the Cape the second school ends in June, so she skips them. Her friends are stuck spending the first five weeks of their summer vacation getting up at 6 am for swim practice - that strikes us as nuts. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach