By Katie Lively, Swimming World College Intern
If at first you don’t succeed, it’s probably not worth the effort, right?
That was how I felt all through elementary school, and looking back, it’s not surprising. I followed in the footsteps of many kids who find their niche at a young age: I was really good at school; therefore, anything that challenged me—particularly playing sports—was boring, unimportant, and/or beneath me.
It was pretty clear by around age 6 that a natural-born athlete, I was not.
I cheered when my soccer coach subbed me out. My softball coach almost always put me in the outfield because I couldn’t take my eyes off the molehills and focus on the game to save my life. When I was finally promoted from swim lessons to swim team at age 8, it was only because I had been at the pre-team level for longer than all the other kids and the team had lots of extra space for new members. At one point, I had by far the worst 50 back time in the whole state.
Even once I settled on swimming as my primary sport, “I didn’t take it seriously” would be an understatement. I spent most of my time ignoring the coach and chatting with my best friend on the team, who may have cared even less than I did. Years later, when I brought this up to the coach, he didn’t exactly deny that we had been serious contenders for most challenging kids on the team.
I was going to go to college and be a world-famous author when I grew up, so why did I need to waste my time on a sport— especially when I wasn’t even instantly good at it?
At age 10, I was bored of it and decided to quit— just like I quit ballet, gymnastics, soccer, softball, and, randomly, piano. My parents told me to stick with it for six more months. About halfway through that final six months, I started crying at the end of a swim meet because I was sad it was over, and I declared to my mom that swimming was my passion.
To this day, I’m not quite sure exactly what brought that on. Regardless, I’m glad my 10-year-old self had an odd little epiphany.
I didn’t achieve greatness in the sport from that day forward. It took immense focus, boosted by a talented 19-year-old age group coach who believed in me in a way no one else ever had, to even reach a point at which I was on par with other swimmers my age.
What I did achieve from that day forward was an appreciation for hard work and compassion for those who struggled despite their best efforts.
Photo Courtesy: Sandy Lively
Deciding to put my heart into something I was pretty awful at meant accepting that I was going to get it stomped on a few more times than the average kid. But it also meant seeing the steady improvement that can come from making that choice. To this day, I still remember the way my age group coach yelled when I won my heat for the first time at age 11.
Those feelings also carried over to the way I treated other kids at school. In elementary and early middle school, I privately grew irritated by the kids who held up class by failing to understand what I deemed basic concepts. At some point in middle school, it hit me that, just like me at swim practice, they had to work twice as hard as everyone else to even come close to keeping up with course material.
In the end, I feel like I ended up with the best of both worlds. It was great that school came pretty naturally to me as a kid. That said, I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out had I not worked my way up from being one of the worst swimmers in my age group to being part of a relay team that went undefeated in our district for two straight years and set school records along the way.
Since starting college, I’ve had no choice but to work hard and put in countless long nights of studying. Just being a high school student would have left me caught off guard by that reality. Swimming prepared me to work as hard as necessary to achieve my goals— and it showed me that I really can overcome major challenges by not giving up.
In addition, I’ve found a love for coaching in my spare time. During an assistant coaching transition my junior year, my high school head coach regularly asked me to help coach the new swimmers. I then worked to set up preseason practices for incoming swimmers the summer before my senior year.
More than anything, I work to find the positives in every frustrated swimmer’s situation. It’s not always about being the star athlete. I’ve never been the star of any team, yet swimming has improved my life and improved me as a person in too many ways to name here.
As an added bonus, I’ve also learned that taking forever to learn technique gives you an abundance of ways to explain it to the next generation.
