Enjoy Your Journey
When I was entering High School as a Freshman, I was a pretty good competitive swimmer and joined my High School Freshman swim team. Midway through the season the coach pulled me and two other kids aside and asked if we would want to try out for the varsity team. In American High Schools there is usually three levels of athletics: the Freshman team, the Junior Varsity (JV) Team, and the Varsity Team. After the Freshman season is over some Freshmen join the JV team with other Freshman and Sophomores or the if they are lucky in a rare instance they join the Varsity team with the older students.
I tried out and made the varsity team, leapfrogging JV. It felt great, here I was a 14 year old kid just a few months removed from grade school and I was going to be swimming in one of the most competitive leagues in the nation against 17 and 18 year olds. That great feeling ended after the first practice. Besides the older kids hazing techniques (which were not that bad), the workouts were impossible and the older kids may have been only 4 years older but seemed light years ahead of me.
It got worse.
At the swim meets, I was used to starting three events and winning my heat, sometimes even setting the fastest time for the entire meet in my event. At my first Varsity meet I only was put in to swim a leg of a relay race. The relay team was the third string relay team and not expected to be competitive or score any points. I went from being a superstar on the Freshman team to a bench player on the varsity team.
I didn’t give up though. The sought after races in High School swimming were the 50m freestyle and 100m freestyle and all the 18 year olds swam those. Locked out of the prime time events but desperate to swim at the meets to prove myself, I asked to swim a race nobody wanted to swim: the 500m freestyle. I figured that since the 500m was not as competitive, I could win a few races, make a name for myself, and trade up to my preferred races the 50m and 100m. The coach said OK but only if I did him a favor. He asked me to compete in the diving competition at each meet.
Our team, like most teams, had no divers. All you had to do was show up for the meet and do three competitive dives, without committing an illegal move, and you are guaranteed first or second place, along with the points associated with that. Without a diver, the coach explained, the team is leaving those valuable points on the table. I told the coach that I did a few diving competitions at my local community pool club as a kid, but really had no idea what I was doing. He said “is that a yes?” I said sure.
I was now committed to swimming the 500m freestyle, diving, and the 50m freestyle 3rd string relay. (For comparison, my 500m single race was longer than most swimmers swam in 3 meets.) It is really hard to train for distance and sprint competitions at the same time, so I just did all of the sprint work outs with the rest of the team. After practice I would have to stay back, alone, and practice my diving as none of our coaches knew anything about diving.
I also was able to go to St. John’s University on Saturdays and practice my distance swimming as my Freshman coach was still a student there and Saturday’s was an open swim for the college team. I would time it right so I would swim with the women’s team. If I was going to be giving up my Saturday morning, I may as well be the only boy in a pool full of 21 year old college women.
Needless to say I was miserable. I was doing 4 workouts a week after school, then staying later for another half hour to practice my diving, usually missing the team bus back to the school, so I had to take the unreliable NYC public bus home from the pool. During the meets, I was competitive enough in the 500m to sometimes earn points, but the diving was borderline embarrassing. I still remember to this day the face on my first ever judge after I tried a 2x flip back dive. At least I was never disqualified and was earning my team the valuable first and second place points. I was doing a weekly work out with the St. Johns women’s team and pretty much finishing slower than their slowest swimmer, bruising my fragile 14 year old ego.
This was not what I had signed up for.
My Freshman coach asked me to do him a favor in exchange for sneaking me into the SJU pool to swim on a 15 and under youth league that he was also coaching. He roped in another of my miserable Freshman varsity friends as well. The only problem was that it was on my only day off, Friday nights. We did it anyway as we felt like we owed our coach. (He was also the assistant coach of the varsity team, so I figured maybe he would help me get back to swimming 50m races sooner.)
I was the anchor swimmer in the last relay. If we won this relay, we would win the entire meet. My buddy John was the 3rd swimmer and as the 2nd swimmer was approaching the wall, he pulled well ahead. John looked back at me before his dive in and said “it’s in the bag.” Indeed it was, we won the relay and won the meet. We celebrated like we won the gold medal at the Olympics. One night a week, swimming was fun.
More importantly, I started to notice how my grueling workouts have started to pay off. I started to compete against myself in the diving (just get better than the last week) and the older kids on the team realized how hard I was working and started to warm up to me. Some of the Seniors would even drive me home (I think this was as much as a way to get “in” with my popular sister who was also a Senior at my high school.)
The coach announced that we were going to the national championships but that most of us would have to set personal best times at the upcoming City Championships first in order to quality. At first I was bummed, no way I would even qualify for City Championships, let alone Nationals. The coach told me that due to all of those uncontested first place and second place diving finishes, I was the highest point scorer on the team and qualified for City Championships!
The seniors were excited, they said that we would all have to “shave down” for the event. Shave down I asked? Basically shave every hair on your body in order to speed up the time by reducing friction in the water. The night before the city championships, I was invited by one of the Seniors to a member of the women’s team house in order to participate in a “shave down party.” Basically we ate pizza while we all shaved our legs, arms, and heads. The girls taught us boys how to shave our legs, it was pretty funny.
Hairless, I crushed my personal record at the city championships at Fordham University, qualified for national championships, and even won my heat at nationals at Villanova University. I would grow to love the 500m freestyle and would go on to swim the 500m freestyle for the remainder of the 4 years I had in High School as well swim competitively in the 50m, 100m, and 200m races. After that freshman year I did not have to dive anymore (some new freshman took over that from me) and I would go on to become the co-captain in my Junior and Senior years. When the school was hiring a new coach going into my Senior year, they even asked me to be on the committee that interviewed the coaches.
I was thinking about this experience, which only lasted from November to March in my Freshman year in High School while on a walk during the stay at home orders of the COVID19 pandemic. Here I am, almost 35 years later, and one of my most vivid memories from High School was a four month period where I thought I was miserable, but turns out I was not. When I made the Varsity team, I wanted to instantly be 4 years older and racing the 50m freestyle with the Seniors. About halfway through the process, I realized I was enjoying the journey. A journey that took four years and took me places I could never imagine when I started. If I never asked to swim the 500m and agreed to do the diving, I never would have went to City, let alone National championships.
Not only did my “hacking the system” mentality stay with me my entire life, but I can now entertain my daughter at the pool doing some fancy dives. (It’s easy to amuse a 4 year old.) I’m not saying that the COVID19 pandemic is a good thing, however, figure out what your 500m freestyle and diving events are, embrace it, and maybe you too will start to enjoy the journey.
