The York Y Rambler

By Coach Michael

2 October 2007

WEEKEND MEET

We begin our short course competitive season this weekend with the WSY Kickoff meet, held at the Cumberland Valley HS pool.  Meet information flyers have been distributed to all families participating, and information has been put on the team website.

Note that we will have our regular Saturday morning practice for those seniors not competing on Saturday morning.

For those competing in the distance event in the afternoon, you should still come to morning practice, but you will get out at about 11:00 a.m., to give you plenty of time to get to the meet.  Do not self-taper by skipping practice.

WORKING THINGS OUT

Soon the high school swimming season will begin, which means that, for those swimmers competing with their high school teams, soon we will have built-in conflicts, even in the best of situations.  This is going to require nearly continual communication, so that each corner of the “Swimmer—Y team & coach—HS team & coach” triangle knows what is happening as we go along.

Let’s be honest.  Here at the York Y we are different.  As a team we have come an awfully long way in the past year.  There is not a high school swimming program in the area that does what we do, as much as we do, or as fast as we do it.  We are unique in having a lot of kids in the water swimming fast, committing to their swimming year-round, and aiming very very high.  And the way to keep moving forward as a swimmer is not to work very hard to reach a high level and then to go backwards.

Kids will make their own choices, but it is highly recommended that high school-aged swimmers train here as often as they can during the high school season.  This will not be convenient – excellence rarely is – but you don’t get better by doing less.

Further, one of the “plums” for our seniors is to qualify for and make the trip to Florida for the Y Nationals.  But it is very important both for team cohesion and for performance peaking that swimmers attending this meet as York Y swimmers are swimming with us, competing with us, and acting as a part of our group during the season leading up to the meet.  There are certain policies in place this year to ensure both that we both take a team to Y Nationals, not a collection of individuals, and that we have focused our preparation on swimming our best at that meet.  The memo on travel meet policies is being distributed separately and will be discussed with our Senior A and B training groups.

TAKING AIM!!!

Looking over our short course season competition schedule, I see a few “benchmark” meets where we will have substantial sized teams attending and we want to put forth a particularly good performance.  Many of our other meets, both duals and invitationals, serve as stepping stones to them.

Some of these important benchmarks are the Winterfest Invitational in early January, the Y Districts & State meets, the Middle Atlantic JO’s (which coincide with the Y States), and the Y Nationals.

We have a lot of swimmers young and old who are setting their goals for these meets, and I want to establish some ground rules:  when setting meet goals and practice expectations, one of the worst things you can do is to train to make a meet, as opposed to training to succeed there.  The point is not to just qualify and finish at the bottom, but to go to the meet and swim fast.

To help guide your expectations of yourselves, I have gone through last year’s results for each of these meets and compiled tables of “times it takes to final” for each event.  Post these tables at home and use them for setting daily training goals and for each meet’s races.  Don’t just train fast enough to qualify; train fast enough to be a “player.”  The more kids we get into finals, the more points we score, and the higher our team finishes in the final results.

ATTITUDE & EXPERIENCE

“It is a game, isn’t it, Mary Poppins?”

“Well, it depends on your point of view.  You see, in every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.  You find the fun, and snap, the job’s a game.  And every task you undertake, becomes a piece of cake, a lark, a spree, it’s very clear to see – that a spoonful of sugar, helps the medicine go down, etc.…”

There are actually people on this earth who do not relish the idea of daily practice, who do not look forward to working very hard, who are not fond of pushing themselves to their limits and beyond.  Astonishing.

There are actually swimmers who slog up and down the pool, who just do the practice to get it over with, who have no goals as they go along, who never think about how the set they are doing is preparing them to race, who are always looking forward to getting done and never focusing on what they are doing, who are seemingly bored on principle.  Curious.

These two groups of swimmers are actually one group.  Your mind and your attitude determine how much joy and how much benefit you will get from swimming practice.

If a swimmer approaches practice differently, from Mary Poppins’ point of view, then every practice is a wonderful experience that he cannot wait to repeat.  If a swimmer sees every single repeat as an opportunity to get faster, every single turn as an opportunity to work on quickness and streamlines and underwater kicking, every single set as an opportunity to race his teammates and to perfect his racing tactics, every practice as an opportunity to remedy his weaknesses and solidify his strengths, then his daily practice will be the most important and most valuable two hours of his day.

If given a choice of being bored out of one’s mind for two hours a day, or being excited and enthusiastic for those same two hours, only a fool would choose to be bored.  Choose to enjoy practice.  Choose to love swimming.  These are two foundations to becoming very fast.

Signing off, Michael