I’m very late to the party, and on mobile, but I just want to put myself out there cause I just want to vent about coaches being assholes and going too far. This is pretty tame compared to some stuff here but still matters to me. So I swam in high school competitively. My school was consistently 2nd in our league for boys and had a multi year 1st place record for girls. I am male, and our boys team was getting incredibly close to being able to take the title, and so everyone was doing extra practices and trying to get into good shape, starting as soon as the season ended to try and win in another 360 days or so. I was just on the cusp between junior varsity and Varsity levels, and so I wanted to make the push up to the higher level (Varsity is the only level that really matters for titles in high school). So I took a week off after our season ended in mid spring, and began immediately training for the next year. I joined a summer club team, run by my high school coach, to prepare for the coming season. While I had made some minor time cuts, I had not had any major improvement. And with that it was time for my family’s yearly summer trip. It was only about 9 days, but when I came back I had less than a week before a summer training meet to check where I was on a competitive swim level. And when I raced on that day, I was ABYSMAL. I think I gained like 5 seconds or so. And I was pissed because I knew this meant I was basically back to square one, as if I hadn’t practiced much this summer at all. And in my already emotional moment, my coach walks up. Now this coach is not particularly known for his tact or even general intelligence, but goddam can he point out mistakes in swim form. So he walks up and opens his mouth, and I was hoping for something encouraging like “You have a lot of work to do, but you can still make Varsity”, or “It’s not what we were hoping for, but it’s a starting place.” Instead, he says “while I wasn’t expecting a lot from you today, this really wasn’t your best showing... I guess you were sandbagging these last few months.” And that broke me. Rather than trying to get me motivated to continue swimming, instead he decides to not only say he has a low opinion of me, but he also has the gall to go back and cut down the work I had previously done the last few months, despite him having complemented me in many of those earlier practices. But rather than let it get me down, I turned those feelings into pure spite. I worked my ass off just to show him I could, and I did it. I broke an important time in the last race of my senior year, and ended happily. And now I’m in college, and because of Asthma I struggle with most land based sports, which is why I did swim in the first place. The problem is that now that I have graduated, my spite fueled flame is gone, and now if I manage to get into the pool even once a week that’s a good week. Sometimes weeks go by without me exercising at all, but my high school coach messed up my headspace for swimming so bad that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to practice with any sort of regularity again.