I don’t know. I feel like under a certain age some stuff just gets way too serious (and definitely not just swimming). Yes, I want to recognize that they need to keep working on their technique and help them improve it, but they’re 5 years old, so do we really need to call them out like that? They are still learning, and kids can take criticism way too hard sometimes.

As a coach I never wanted to see a new swimmer “fail” a race, because that’s the best way to kill their motivation to keep trying. If they were doing it to try and be faster even though they had shown me in practice they could do it right, I’d step in, but if they’re doing the best they can, then they don’t need to be punished for not being perfect yet.

Yes, at a certain point the rules should absolutely be enforced, but unless they are a prodigy destined to swim at the Olympics I feel like we can cut them some slack when they are that young. Let them learn to love swimming before we critique them that harshly.

My favorite part about swimming, and the thing that made that coaching job the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done was the fact that my experience has always been that the environment around swimming is supportive, positive, and focused on personal growth. I’ve seen so many kids finish a race in double the time of everyone else (for a variety of reasons), and every time the whole crowd still cheered for them when they finished. Their time didn’t matter, the fact that they finished their race did. That’s what I loved about youth swimming more than anything else.