Swim Team Volunteering - it helps if you are nice

[Anonymous]

I have learned the hard way not to volunteer for jobs that are nebulous like that. I do the jobs that are very structured like timing or ribbons or runner. There’s no standing around feeling awkward and it helps pass the time at meets. You’ll find your way OP. Seek out the parents who aren’t part of the clique. They usually outnumber the cliquey ones.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, OP. This was our summer swim team experience at our old pool as well. The pool overall was super friendly, but the swim team parents were not welcoming to new people at all. It was the same group of parents whose multiple kids have swum together for years, and it was just extremely cliquish.

Do what I do...embrace it. I go in with a mug of coffee, sit in the back, ignore all the parents, watch the swimming, grab my kid, and leave. It's fantastic!
And in my club you can volunteer to bring food instead of having to do a job, so that makes it even easier.

New to swim team and having a similar experience as OP. I have decided to do snacks similar to PP and see if my kid enjoys swim team before deciding what to do next summer

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have learned the hard way not to volunteer for jobs that are nebulous like that. I do the jobs that are very structured like timing or ribbons or runner. There’s no standing around feeling awkward and it helps pass the time at meets. You’ll find your way OP. Seek out the parents who aren’t part of the clique. They usually outnumber the cliquey ones.

Not OP but good advice. I'll try this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, OP. This was our summer swim team experience at our old pool as well. The pool overall was super friendly, but the swim team parents were not welcoming to new people at all. It was the same group of parents whose multiple kids have swum together for years, and it was just extremely cliquish.

Do what I do...embrace it. I go in with a mug of coffee, sit in the back, ignore all the parents, watch the swimming, grab my kid, and leave. It's fantastic!
And in my club you can volunteer to bring food instead of having to do a job, so that makes it even easier.

New to swim team and having a similar experience as OP. I have decided to do snacks similar to PP and see if my kid enjoys swim team before deciding what to do next summer

I've had kids doing swim for years, and that's all we expect from new parents. Enjoy your kid and hopefully they'll have enough fun to stick around. Once they decide to, then start stepping up a little bit more. Timing is really easy and a good way to break in.

[Anonymous]

Agreed, timing is the best- the people who time are not cliquey. They are task-oriented and usually nice. Avoid the desk/meal work!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ladder is the publicly posted times sheet broken out by age/gender/stroke. Its so you know what time you need to be selected for A meets.

What does your summer swim team call the official list of times?

Ours doesn't post since some of the times used from B meets are not "real" times. B meets tend of have officials that don't properly call DQs. So if a kid is not legal and they see it that basically highlight that fake legal time as something not to consider. I have seen it happen. I saw a breaststroke event a kid did butterfly kicks 1/3 of the pool and it didn't get called and was a "legal" time that was far from legal. You can't put that in the ladder it would ruin your seeding. We use A meet times as our main time and try to put in legit B times.

Is that NVSL? One of the reason that volunteers get burned out is that meets (including B meets) need qualified stroke and turn judges as well as referees and starters and three timers per lane so that the times count. If only A meet times counted, most of the kids at our pool would never get a time or a chance to improve because each age group has way more swimmers than A meets have slots.

THIS. B meet times absolutely count and the entire point is to improve times in order to make the cut for A meets. The cut is not subjective, it’s the top posted times, based upon “the ladder” or official times which all these “experienced swim moms” claim not to know about.

Our summer swim team has a huge mandatory volunteer requirement that you cannot pay your way out of. We have (no kidding) 10 “board members” who do not have to volunteer at meets because they are exempt. They just stand around in their cliques and chit chat while the rest of us sweat and run ourselves ragged.

That would infuriate me. We have team reps who end up showing up for setup and staying through take down working as hard as anyone. We don't have a volunteer requirement both to encourage families to get their kids swimming at meets and because we usually can get enough volunteers even, but having them and then people exempting themselves would never fly at our pool.

What is wrong with you? Those 10 board members are probably doing an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. I'm not one of the "leaders" but I know enough to understand the volume and tediousness of the work that has to be done that you don't see. Our main swim rep spent at least 80-100 hours before the season started creating the calendar, just making sure we booked the space with the pool manager, coordinated with the other clubs in our division, doing required training and meetings for the league, recruiting stroke and turn judges, interviewing and hiring new coaches, creating a survey to figure out what families wanted for the new swim season, consulting with the pool board and public health guidance on covid protocols. The list goes on and on. Another parent spent 20-30 creating the swimtopia, and another one worked on updates to meet manager - both of which are thankless and really boring jobs that require a lot of detailed work. Our B meet rep contacted a half dozen pools to figure out which ones might be interested in swimming against our pool and worked to figure out a schedule and ground rules for how the meets should work. Each pool has its own quirks about how they think they should work. Then he had to communicate that to our pool families. Not to mention ordering supplies like ribbons, replacing any signs or chairs that were broken last year. My head hurts from thinking about all the things they are doing and I for one am glad they are doing it.

If I have to sweat it out for 4 hours for all of our 6 B meets doing something mindless like timing while they walk around supervising that is fine. FWIW at our pool our reps also come early, and they are there moving chairs and sweating it out with the rest of us. They even stay late to pick up the TRASH that you and your kids could not be bothered to pick up because they want to be respectful to the people maintaining the pool.

OP is unbelievable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is OP. A lot of you are terrible at reading comprehension. Thank you to the people who get it. Thank you also to the jerks who proved my point.

1. It was not a meet. It was a social event. The shifts were named “set up”, “monitor event”, and “clean up”. I signed up for “monitor event”.
2. I showed up and said “I signed up for the monitor event shift, how can I help?” And I was snapped at “the real work was set up” and I was given no further instructions. The kids were making spirit items for an upcoming meet. I watched for a few minutes to see what kids were struggling and helped them. I stayed to clean up because it appeared no one else was going to do it.
3. I don’t need a long discussion. Once the event was running and kids were occupied, an adult could have said “are you new?” Or “who is your kid?” Or anything to acknowledge that I was not some random adult who wandered off the street.
As I was carrying tables or taking out trash at the end, someone could have said “thanks! See you next time.”
4. I volunteer for all kinds of school and preschool stuff. I am capable and responsible. I show up early and I humbly observe and take direction from experienced parents to learn how things are done. I manage a team at work and I’ve been a program manager for a large consulting firm - I know a thing or two about running a team volunteer or otherwise.

I don’t need a welcome wagon. I don’t need new best friends. I just want to be treated like a my presence is welcome instead of being snapped at for the offense of doing literally what I was asked. The cherry on top was having to listen to the team coordinator gossip / complain loudly about the lack of volunteers while I still had paint under my nails from volunteering.

I don't think that sounds nice but it also doesn't sound particularly rude.

[Anonymous]

Thinking back a few years when DC first went on swim team I can say that for sure there were some snippy snappy moms. I remember one in particular. She had a rigid system for the job she was doing and if people didn't follow her system, which wasn't really dependent on the adults helping her but the children, she was not very nice.

Never really got upset about that because I could tell it was a very difficult job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thinking back a few years when DC first went on swim team I can say that for sure there were some snippy snappy moms. I remember one in particular. She had a rigid system for the job she was doing and if people didn't follow her system, which wasn't really dependent on the adults helping her but the children, she was not very nice.

Never really got upset about that because I could tell it was a very difficult job.

Was it clerk of course? If so I can understand that. It's a stressful job sometimes particularly at time trials and B meets when there's a lot of kids... especially during IM which is always deck seeded in our league. If the system breaks down it's chaos. The kids don't always show up when they're supposed to, they don't always stay where they're supposed to, and some just hover over you repeatedly asking what heat or lane they're in while you're trying to line up another group of kids. I've not been snippy with adults but if the same kid who is old enough to know better asks me 5 times what heat they're in when I am clearly dealing with a different event, it's hard to maintain a friendly tone when asking them to hold on a minute.

[Anonymous]

Our swim team was like this too. Parents did not warm to us because be daughter showed up and could swim. She was a threat. Swimming is not my daughter’s main sport so I just kind of laughed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our swim team was like this too. Parents did not warm to us because be daughter showed up and could swim. She was a threat. Swimming is not my daughter’s main sport so I just kind of laughed.

You’re kidding yourself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our swim team was like this too. Parents did not warm to us because be daughter showed up and could swim. She was a threat. Swimming is not my daughter’s main sport so I just kind of laughed.

LOL

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our swim team was like this too. Parents did not warm to us because be daughter showed up and could swim. She was a threat. Swimming is not my daughter’s main sport so I just kind of laughed.

LOL

You all laugh but I could totally see one of the moms on my kid’s team acting like this. I have kids the same age as her girls and I’m so thankful I have two boys so I don’t have to deal with it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our swim team was like this too. Parents did not warm to us because be daughter showed up and could swim. She was a threat. Swimming is not my daughter’s main sport so I just kind of laughed.

LOL

You all laugh but I could totally see one of the moms on my kid’s team acting like this. I have kids the same age as her girls and I’m so thankful I have two boys so I don’t have to deal with it.

But NO ONE warmed up to her. Because they were all so threatened. One person? I’ll buy that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have older kids. I don't even have time to talk to the adults I do know and by now I know a lot of them and maybe have 30 minutes a week to talk to all of them. I am now responsible for a lot of things beyond just swim and simply don't have the bandwidth and I am not a leader in anything other than my small job I sign up for each week at the pool so I'm not the welcoming committee in any way. Most of the parents with younger kids don't want to talk to me. They want to talk to other moms with 6 year olds. If I am a timer, I talk to the people I'm timing with. If I do clerk of course, I talk to them. I don't spend extra minutes trying to meet the new parents. A lot of this is someone just not signing up for stuff and expecting everyone else to be like a kindergarten teacher. Our social chair this year has been at the pool for one year and her oldest is 9. I guarantee that the following year that position the the mom with four kids whose youngest is finishing their last years is going to give that position up and then it's all yours if you want it.

This is a lot of words to state the following, which is how many people feel:{

I have my friends and I don't need new ones. The end. This is the way a lot of people feel. But as this person also points out (with too many words), there are newbies who don't feel this way, so find them. Eventually and organically over time, you will morph into this cranky person above. And the cycle will continue.

Yep, I’m a lot like PP. Former rep and Uber volunteer for years. My youngest is in 17. I still volunteer, but It’s time for a new generation of leaders.