Reply to Are swim moms like dance moms?!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am both. (If you count summer swim as a “swim mom”)

Summer swim is in a league of its own. It’s supposed to be a flurry of fun for 1.5 months.
The swim parents involved in summer swim are just volunteers that are trying to make a fun experience for their kids.

True swim parents have kids that swim year round and yes they can be as competitive and catty as dance moms. [/quote]

I am also both and I was a competitive, 6-days-per-week dancer growing up. In my experience, club swim parents are the best. Our closest friends are swim parents we met sitting outside practice or in the bleachers. Nobody cares about who is faster, etc. Kids just hang out together and have such fun. Parents mostly work or talk about things completely unrelated to swim, unless it’s to compliment someone’s swimmer.

Dance is a whole other animal, mostly because — like in Dance Moms — the more private lessons you pay for, the more lessons you pay for, the more costumes you pay for, the more money the studio makes. Also, dance is significantly more subjective in terms of who makes company, who gets solos/trios at competitions, who gets to do that special event at [insert fancy setting] or that commercial shoot, etc.

Swim is not subjective. Moving to elite practice groups is because a child has the cut times that are for the group. My child is an AA swimmer for NCAP. She has only been on a handful of relays, and we know going to any meet she almost certainly won’t be on the relays because NCAP is huge and there are easily 8 girls from NCAP ahead of her. And that’s okay. Nobody cares and few kids even know who swam on any relays. Some kids make elite meets, some kids don’t. Nobody cares. They are still friends and make crafts and play Taco Cat or Uno at every meet they attend together. They cheer for their B time friends and their AAA friends. And no amount of schmoozing up the coaches will change the times a swimmer swims. [/quote]
The fact that club swimming is objective is one of my favorite parts of it. Yes, kids are still competitive with each other but you don’t need to specifically beat another kid to make a high level meet. Your time just needs to be under the cut time, regardless of what any other kid does. The swimmers in the relay mix are aware of their position, but that is a very small group of swimmers at a club like NCAP. We are an NCAP family and it seems that each individual age has a group of swimmers that when they are at the top of the age group are on all the relays. [/quote]

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