Reply to Club swimmer plateau/mental hurdle

Forum Index » Swimming and Diving

Reply to "Club swimmer plateau/mental hurdle"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He'll either hit puberty and have the frame of a fast swimmer or he won't. A lot of younger kids who start early and are athletic and coordinated (which seems to be associated with compact builds in younger kids) jumps out fast, but fall back as other kids get bigger and stronger. [/quote]

+1 So very true![/quote]

+1  Seen this firsthand with some of the boys in our swim club - and they're not able to hang now that they're in the 11-12 & above groups.  While they still swim for the club, they've all started other sports to develop additional skill sets (e.g., lacrosse, baseball, soccer, etc...).  There are more college scholarships for those sports than swimming.[/quote]

It’s funny how so many posters in this and the “delayed puberty” thread are jumping to this conclusion that when a swimmer hits a tougher phase at the bottom of their age group they are simply just not good at the sport after all. It’s like weird jealousy or schadenfreude, and completely illogical since this is a very normal experience for most successful swimmers and other athletes. Yes, there are kids who are the best at 10 then drop the sport, but far more common are the elite 10 year olds who eventually become the elite senior swimmers, despite bumps in the road through the puberty years. [/quote]

It’s not about no longer being good. It’s about not getting better and others passing them by, and not wanting to work through it. If you have been around the sport long enough you will see it happen over and over and over. I grew up in a smaller state where summer swim was big. If you were a good year round swimmer you pretty much knew everyone else who swam year round and was good. If I look at old results I can still recognize the names and remember who ended up where. A small handful of the young stars ended up swimming for elite college programs. Most were good enough to be setting league records as 6/8/10 year olds. They were also extremely competitive people and hard workers as they got older. Then there are a whole slew of kids who were very fast but not league record setters, who were complete non-factors after puberty. Swimming started requiring hard work to stay on top and they just didn’t want to do it. [b]If OP’s kid has a great work ethic he probably will end up being great.[/b] But swimming is just really hard to stick with for a lot of kids when the winning isn’t happening anymore, friends are doing other fun things, etc. Only time will tell. [/quote]

This is a good takeaway. The 10u one and done story misses the fact that they are often overtaken not because the universe is reestablishing it’s equilibrium, but because they are competing against kids who are working harder than them at 11/12 or 13/14. Aside from the case of the 5’6” 10 year old who weighs 140# and stops growing soon after, most 10u swimmers who do well are practicing more than the ones who aren’t. At 11/12, other kids start dedicating themselves to practice more than they did at 10u, and now they are the fastest. It’s a denominator phenomenon. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics