How good are you at swimming? It’s really hard to judge. It would seem that swimming is a very objective sport. You can actually compare “apples to apples” with any swimmer in the country regardless of age, gender, or region. You can’t do that to decide the best basketball player, lacrosse player, or volleyball player. You can’t even do that to decide the best cross-country runner because all courses are different. The distances are the same, but the terrain is different. So with this in mind, let’s let our objectively obsessive minds go to work and look at the percentile based motivational times:

USA Swimming's Percentile Based Times

It looks like about 50% of all 11 to 12 year-old swimmers in the country hit a BB time. It looks like about 25% hit the A. It looks like about 2% hit the AAAA times. This is on the NATIONAL scale! Hey, BB swimmers, in what other sport can you be assured that you are better than HALF the other participants in the entire NATION?

This look at perceptions of competence in the sport stems from conversations I have every year with swimmers (usually ages 11-13). I had a swimmer who had just achieved her first ever A time at Regional Champs inform me that she would be missing a good chunk of swim practice to take up school track. I encouraged her to keep a broad perspective on playing other sports, and then asked if she was better at track than she was at swimming. She said, “Yes! Way better!” I asked if she had represented her school at the state regional level before. She said that she made the district track meet, last year, but missed out on the county meet. I then tried to convince her that if she is scoring in the STATE regional meet in swimming, and not making the COUNTY meet in track, that would indicate that she was a better swimmer than a runner. I don’t think she saw my point, because she then pointed out one of our swimmers from her school who she promoted as a, “Really, really good runner.” I asked if he was a STATE champion last year, and she replied that he did really well in the COUNTY track meet. I then informed her that he was a STATE champion swimmer last year.

While I would never say that any of our multi-sport athletes are less talented at any other sport in which they compete, the point of this message is to take a look at how valuable you really are as a swimmer. I think that a lot of kids leave swimming far too early, with the perception that they aren’t very good at it. Maybe they didn‘t make it to the state level, the zone level, or the national level. However, the same swimmers seem perfectly happy playing Junior Varsity tennis at the district level. They perceive that they are better at tennis because they are better than most of the school in tennis. However, they could be faster than most of their age-group in the whole COUNTRY, and feel that they are not very competitive swimmers (a glass half empty mentality may be at work here).

Is USA Swimming missing the boat here? Is there too much emphasis on excellence and not enough emphasis on participation? I think it goes back to “apples vs. apples.” The ability for a AA level 15-year-old boy to compare his times with Michael Phelps would obviously make swimming seem like a daunting sport in which to choose to excel. When you are selected for the freshman basketball team out of the 30 other kids who tried out, the perception of success is a lot higher, even though the level of excellence is a lot lower.

As we near toward the end of another season, many young impressionable swimmers will be asked, “Do you still want to ‘do’ year-round swimming?” The answer EVERY swimmer on our team SHOULD be giving is, “YES, because I’m GOOD at it!”

Some good articles, food for thought:

Before the Big Time

College Swimming...it's not a matter of IF, it's a matter of WHERE