Reply to What age to swim teams start?

Forum Index » Swimming and Diving

Reply to "What age to swim teams start?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Oh, and a comment about the starting early crowd with swim.

I am currently watching a crop of early swimmers that had immense success now having a LOT of issues. They are no longer experience the huge time drops of younger kids and all of these new swimmers that started at 11 that were not much in the way of competition then are now catching up and surpassing in times at the 13-14 age group.

They have been overtraining for years and are frustrated.  I now see why kids burn out.[/quote]

Its just really sad that every sport is so competitive. There is nothing that the kids can do for fun. Its always about winning, being the fastest etc. Sucks for these kids. My kid wants to swim for fun and I am having a hard time finding a place where he can swim 2x a week without any meets or competition.[/quote]

Clubs that have programs where you 2x a week sometimes say competition/meets is desirable but not mandatory and I've seen that be the case for teenagers, too, where some of the winter programs are more geared towards maintenance because swimmer cares more summer swim and not USA swimming meets, for instance. I'm unaware of any cases where they refuse to allow a kid to participate because the kid decided not to do any meets. I'd ask teams/coaches to get their thoughts.

Recognizing that cultures across and within clubs can have vary widely, speaking from my vantage point having 2 kids who've been doing club swimming since 9-10, I will say that I've seen a wide range of kids in the 9-14 where not everyone is fixated on winning/fastest. Practically speaking, swimming is a tough sport and so if "winning"/being the fastest are your top reasons for swimming, I have to imagine that you're going to encounter serious disappointment.

[/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