Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This should be a new thread. Pop Warner much more akin to summer swim. Very different from club.

And that is not a bad thing. Just saying

Not if you’re in FL/GA/TX (and Pop Warner isn’t the literal league for most youth football leagues — and I don’t mean silly flag football kids do here; when we use Pop Warner, it’s like using the term “Kleenex” when we mean any tissue). Young football players (under age 14) only learn the game through youth leagues and then, if they are good enough/if puberty is kind, they make the high school team. But very very few will play college football. Youth football in Va/Md is nothing like those three states, but is very analogous to club swimming in the DMV. (And, yes, once a player is on the college scouts’ radar, then the supplementals kick in with all the camps, private coaching, etc; but this largely doesn’t happen until a boy is mid-way through puberty, and mostly doesn’t happen until they are minimally in 8th grade, but mostly not until 10th+.) All of this is to underscore that swimming club is valuable regardless of the post-secondary outcome, as it is with gymnastics, and playing an instrument, and dance, and cheer, and….

Anonymous wrote:This should be a new thread. Pop Warner much more akin to summer swim. Very different from club.

And that is not a bad thing. Just saying

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am actually surprised all of these programs are surviving due to the NCAA/House litigation that is shrinking swim rosters, particularly men’s. I think the threshold for swimming in college is going to get exponentially harder, so it is getting harder to justify the sacrifices made to not get a slot and probably hurt your chances in regular college admissions bc you have no other activities. I have always been told Winter juniors cuts and good grades will get a kid a slot at a D1 school. I think you are now going to need faster times than that, which is really hard.

As a parent of a kid staring down this reality and who loves to be in the water, it is depressing. I feel bad they have spent so much time on the sport (and achieved what used to be the needed standards) and it will likely go no where now. If I had a younger kid I would stick with summer swim and HS swim and try to develop other interests.

And, please save the criticism. I know there are worse problems in the world and I already blame myself for giving in when they asked to do all this.

This is crazy to me. My kids play different club sports. Not once did we go in with an expectation of a NCAA scholarship. Sports, including swim, are about so much more than getting a D1 scholarship.

Actually your kid is more likely to get. d1 scholarship after the NCAA House litigation. It is walk-ons who have been eliminated and roster size has been cut. But I guess my point is when you start aging into the elite HS groups I am not sure it is worth doing if you are not swimming in college and that is so much harder now. I too was a parent who agreed to club swim when my kid was little bc they absolutely loved it and it gave them another social outlet and seemed like healthy non-contact exercise. But now we are at a crossroads where my kid can’t participate in a lot of school activities or hold a job during the school year bc practice is so intense. It seemed worth it when they were chasing college dreams but now I am questioning it. I am just trying to provide this perspective to parents thinking about getting on the swim train. The world is wide and big!