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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So far no one has mentioned they regretted having their kids in club swimming..I have a 9 year old in club swimming so good to hear! Although the time commitment gets pretty brutal by the teen years, no one regrets it?[/quote]

I enjoyed swimming when I was a kid, but I definitely regret swimming in high school. The time commitment was insane preventing me from trying other clubs and activities, and I found it hard to be a part of other friends groups besides the swim team. Being in a swimsuit daily and a coach who thought he had the right to monitor our weight caused body image problems that lead to an eating disorder. Morning practices meant I was always sleep deprived. My skin was always dry and I smelled like chlorine, and the chlorine fumes would sometimes mess with my lungs and eyes during practices. It all ended up being for nothing because I was so burnt out and decided to pass on a college swimming scholarship. [/quote]

Another former swimmer who regrets doing it at such a high level. I spent my teen years absurdly sleep deprived and underweight from overtraining and disordered eating. It was also hugely disappointing and demoralizing to realize success was based mostly on genetics and [b]I would never be college scholarship material despite taking it more seriously than anyone else on the team. And despite all the time I put into it, the other girls on the team excluded me quite a bit so I didn’t have good friends from the team. [/b]I still think swimming is a great sport, but I would have been a lot better off with 3-4 practices rather than 10. In general, I think it’s a shame that so many kids’ activities are so “serious” and wish there were more opportunities to participate in a more balanced way and that there wasn’t such a culture of extreme levels of participation being treated as morally superior. [/quote]

Some of this sounds very difficult, but I suspect the “exclusion” was the result of your belief that you took the team more seriously “than anyone else on the team.” Yikes.[/quote]

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