The York Y Rambler
2 January 2007
By Coach Michael
After a brief hiatus and holiday training camp, the Rambler has returned. HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
Let’s hope that 2007 is filled with rapid improvement and very very fast and beautiful swimming.
PRACTICE ADJUSTMENTS
Because of the Winterfest meet this weekend, we will be adjusting practices slightly on Friday 5
January to accommodate those families who will be traveling to College Park.
Swimmers – of all ages and training groups – RACING AT WINTERFEST will train from
4:00 to 5:30 p.m. this Friday.
Swimmers – of all ages and training groups – NOT RACING at Winterest will train from 5:30 to
7:30 p.m. this Friday. The youngest kids will obviously not train the whole two hours.
Saturday practice will be as scheduled: 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
SPY WINTERFEST
Entries, directions, and information regarding the SPY Winterfest have been distributed to mailboxes
and are posted on the team website. For those racing this weekend, get yourselves mentally and
physically prepared to swim very very very fast. This is a good opportunity to take big steps forward.
(Fear the turtle.)
Even if you are not competing this weekend, you may still and are welcomed to attend the meet
(after Saturday practice, of course). It is always fun and edifying to watch fast swimming, and the
pool is only a stone’s throw (and a brief metro ride) from Washington, D.C., where there is enough
to see and do to keep you busy for a day. Our competing swimmers would appreciate the support,
and you get a nice day trip.
WORDS OF WISDOM
“It’s 10 a.m. The Y is shut down. It’s New Year’s Day, and Coach Michael accidentally
locked me in the pool. But just think, I have the whole pool to myself and I can train for
twenty-four hours straight before anyone else shows up. And it will all pay off someday.”
Coleman Stewart, future Olympic champion
BRIEF NOTES & KUDOS
When we have no weekend meet and the “regular schedule” applies, Saturday practices
have been adjusted to 9:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. to accommodate the Special Olympics swimmers.
If there are any of our Saturday morning swimmers who would like to help out with the Special Olympics
kids before our practices begin, see me and I can set you up.
We are in the process of switching our team sponsorship from Speedo to TYR for our uniforms and equipment.
One of my friends is a big dog at TYR, and they are going to take very good care of us. We will be using T&T
sportswear in Lancaster as our main supplier. More news and order forms in the near future.
Paige Strathmeyer was the winner of the “Make Coach Michael a Business Card” contest.
For her efforts and computer expertise, she received the grand prize of a copy of Michael Phelps’ biography.
Very interesting and motivating reading. Thanks, and congratulations, Paige.
We are planning on having most of our swimmers attend the Big Cat meet at Penn State in late February.
To enter this meet you must be registered with USA Swimming. If you are considering or planning on
entering this meet, and you are not currently registered USA-S, you need to see me about this immediately!!
We will be doing entries immediately after the Winterfest meet.
Also immediately after the Winterfest, we will be doing entries for our Tournament of Champions meet.
If you are not planning on swimming, let me know ASAP in writing; if you have special requests, let me know
ASAP in writing.
I have been asked by the new president of USA Swimming to serve on the National Age Group Development
Committee. There are six or seven of us from around the country on this committee, and we will be meeting in
Colorado Springs (the headquarters of both USA Swimming and the US Olympic Committee) once or twice a
year, in addition to frequent telephone meetings. Our mandate is to build age group swimming in the U.S. by gathering
“best practices” from the top programs and from cutting edge science, and to spread those good ideas to coaches and
programs around the country.
We are trying to compile a complete and current directory of email addresses for all team families. Please get your family’s
email address (parents’ address, not the kids’) to Sandy Koch ASAP. Either put the address in the Koch mailbox at the pool,
or email to kochds@verizon.net.
Kudos to New Arrivals:
Jackson Brooks, 8 pounds plus, this morning, to Ian and Mary Brooks of Baltimore. Mother and child
(and very frazzled dad) doing well. I promised we would swim a very hard practice in celebration.
To our Academic Honor Roll:
Brian Strathmeyer
Lily Matson
Katherine Triggs
Garrett Wampler
Coleman Stewart
Noah Stewart
Ellie Eline
CALLING VOLUNTEERS
Very soon we will be hosting the Tournament of Champions meet. Running a meet of this size (and meets even bigger,
in the future) takes a lot of work, a lot of help, and a lot of helpers. This year’s meet will require about 100 people to
run efficiently. We need parents from each family on the team to help out. If you have not already signed up on the sheet
posted at the pool bulletin board, please do so soon. Thanks.
Over and above this particular meet, we are in dire need of parent help, especially folks to help run the computer and
timing systems, and officials. Timers are usually plentiful, but these “skill positions” are not, as they require prior training.
No experience necessary, just interest and willingness to help. We can get you the training.
If we want to be able to run home meets, and if we want to be able to use revenues from home meets to fund much-needed
program upgrades, we need the volunteer staff to run those meets, and to run them well enough so that other teams want to
come to our meets (word spreads among coaches very quickly when a host team is incompetent at running meets).
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
You don’t get fast by being slow. You don’t get strong by being weak. You don’t get beautiful by swimming ugly.
THE FALSE DICHOTOMY
OF SLOW & FAST
There seems to be a very odd – and harmful -- constellation of misunderstandings
about kids, talent, and performance that I’ve found to be very common among parents
and swimmers.
Some of the many parts of this tangle of thoughts are: that teams are inhabited by
‘slow kids’ and ‘fast kids’; that each of these groups is set; that kids cannot or do
not move from one group to the other, as if kids had tattoos marking them for life
from the moment they enter the program; and that coaches can talk about excellence,
high expectations, and high goals with the ‘fast kids’ but not with the ‘slow kids.’
Parents and kids seem to accept this division and the supposed chasm between the
two groups. Parents of ‘slow kids’ seem to assume that their kids will always be ‘slow’
and that they should have no expectations of advancement and few hopes of substantial
improvement. The kids are almost taught that they shouldn’t expect much, shouldn’t
dream too high. And not much is expected of them as a result.
Parents of ‘fast kids’ seem a little too pleased with the level their kids have reached,
even if there is enormous room for improvement when those levels are compared not
with the current local performances but with state and national levels. Kids are often
treated as superstars because they win a dual meet against the neighbors.
I think that both of these approaches are seriously misguided, and that when widely
held they can torpedo the program and the individual swimmers in it. Neither despair
or complacency is worthy of us, and neither is an appropriate response to our actual
situation.
Some important considerations:
First: What do you define as fast? Winning an event at a dual meet? Qualifying for Districts?
Qualifying for Y States? Qualifying for Zones? Qualifying for Sectionals? Qualifying for Y
Nationals? Qualifying for Junior Nationals? Qualifying for Senior Nationals? Making the
Olympic team? How about not just qualifying, but finalling or even winning at one of these
meets? Getting an A time? Getting a AAAA time? Getting an National Top 16 time? Breaking
a league record? Breaking a state record? A National Age Group (NAG) record?
An American record? A world record?
Where do we set the bar? By the easiest of these standards, we have a lot of fast kids on
the team. By the most strict, we have none. In fact, the higher the level you define as ‘fast’,
which means the bigger your vision and the higher your goals, the less likely you are to
define yourself as a member of the ‘fast kids club,’ because you are dissatisfied with your
current level and want to reach higher and swim faster than you do right now.
Second: I do not believe in a permanent underclass. Just looking at the last couple of months
here at the Y, we have already had several kids prove false the assumption that kids don’t
move from group to group, by getting excited about swimming fast and as a result getting
much better. They were ‘slow kids’ and they became ‘fast kids.’ I have seen the same transition
hundreds of times in my coaching career.
As I frequently tell the kids, “fast swimmers are fast for a reason, and slow swimmers are slow
for a reason.” Certain behaviors and ways of thinking lead to swimming fast, as night follows day;
certain others lead to swimming slow, just as certainly.
So, if you want to be a champion, do what the champions do. If you come to practice, if you
work hard when you’re at the pool, if you think about and work on improving your strokes every
day, if you challenge yourself and your teammates every day to swim faster, if you refuse to
accept your supposed limits, if you get just a little bit tougher every day, then you will wake up
each morning better than you were the night before.
The Olympic motto is “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” The English translation here is not
‘fast, high, or strong’, but ‘faster, higher, stronger’. I think that distinction is important, and in
that distinction lies our whole reason for being.
There is not one single person on this team so un-talented that they cannot get MUCH better than
they are now. And there is not one single person on this team so talented that they cannot get
MUCH better than they are now. The whole point is to get better. Every practice. Every meet.
Every kid. No matter where you are on the spectrum of performance from world’s slowest to
world record holder, you can always get faster. And you should want to.
Forget about ‘fast’, forget about the pecking order and ranking yourselves and others, forget about
status. I want every single kid in this pool getting FASTER every day. When we do that,
“fast” takes care of itself and “slow” disappears.
WORDS OF WISDOM
“To be satisfied is to be finished.”
Percy Cerutty, coach of Olympic champions
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Champions are champions because of what they do, not who they are.