Swimming Blogs - Mrs. Coach

As Mrs. Coach ventures into more masters’ swim meets, she has come up with a race strategy unlike any she has ever utilized in her athletic life – to give it 95 percent. And so far, it’s working. Mr. Coach understands and endorses her strategy. As he so helpfully expressed it when she presented him with her 95-Percent Strategy theory, "When you haven’t grown up doing something, it’s easy to try too hard. It takes 1-2 years for you to learn how to do something new correctly." (Mrs. Coach restrained herself from pointing out that it only took her four… more »

In most parts of the U.S., we have turned the corner on outdoor-allergy season and are now embarking upon the upper-respiratory infection season. Nowhere is this more evident than in a pool. Or, to be more precise, in a pool’s lockerroom where half the team is gacking up a lung before and after swim practice. The lockerroom is where you can really see and hear who’s got what and how bad. In the pool itself, it all sort of smears together and one can only hope that chlorine is killing most of it. Some of this onslaught of disease will… more »

Just as there are different types of coaches and different types of swimmers, there are also different types of swim parents. And though you sometimes hear the expression "the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree" in the sports world to describe athletes and their parents, it has been Mrs. Coach’s experience that, more often than not, apples do not fall from apple trees. Oranges do. Kumquats even. Sometimes large inanimate objects that couldn’t get into the pool on time for warmups if their lives depended on it. And usually those are the ones who were birthed by a PTA… more »

In Mrs. Coach’s alternate existence as a newspaper reporter, part of her job is to gain a passable understanding of the language in each new world she encounters. Everything in life is its own little world with its own culture and language, whether it’s a 4-H club devoted to miniature horses (talk about control-freak moms), people who collect Christmas nativity scenes (a surprisingly humorless bunch), or clinical anatomists (you do NOT want to know where med-school skeletons come from). When you’re a visitor to these worlds, figuring out the language is half the fun. But then, once you’re done visiting,… more »

A couple of years ago, when it became clear that Mrs. Coach’s switch from running to swimming was going to stick, Mr. Coach and the little Coaches got her a swimming-related Mother’s Day gift – one of those in-water music players, a Finis SwiMP3, to be specific. Her yardage doubled overnight. Mrs. Coach’s SwiMP3, the first model available, was a clunky-looking thing with big earpiece flaps and a control module that sat on the back of her head. She looked like she was part of a medical experiment. As a result, she never failed to get a lane to herself.… more »

Earlier this fall, Mr. Coach had to get the assistant coaches for the USS club he and Mrs. Coach manage certified. Part of the certification process is to pass a multiple-choice test with questions about a variety of "what if" situations that a coach might face. One of the questions he was telling Mrs. Coach about involved what a coach would do if the air quality was really bad inside a natatorium. The point of his sharing was to say that the correct answer was "stop the practice," while the real answer was "open the doors and turn on the… more »

People sometimes ask Mrs. Coach how her children are affected by having a swim coach for a parent. Well, for starters, she says, they don’t know any better so let’s not get them thinking they’ve been affected, OK? Don’t all children have a revolving cast of 27 babysitters, each of whom is a Red Cross-certified lifeguard? Don’t all children go to their first college party at the age of six months and get used as "chick magnets"? Don’t all children become the subject of semester-long Abnormal Psychology studies or have big toys called Vasa Trainers? And don’t all children have… more »

Mrs. Coach has figured out that normal people (i.e., people who aren’t swim coaches or married to them) go through three wedding-attendance cycles in their lives. The first one comes right after college when a small but significant group of your friends decides they need to lock in early because they’re afraid their good luck will run out if they lose a hold of this one. The next cycle starts about five years later and runs for another five, as the rest of your friends decide it’s time to trade in the happy-hour shot glasses for a lovely set of… more »

Mrs. Coach believes there are two types of coaches. One type is the "screamer" who provides motivation for those who are unable or perhaps unwilling to provide it for themselves. The other type seems to be most effective in working with those athletes who don’t respond well to the motivation offered by the screamers. You could perhaps call this type of coach the "swimmer whisperer," if you want to be trendy, but in reality Mrs. Coach just calls this type the "non-screamer." Mr. Coach is this latter type of coach. He is, after all, the type of person who, on… more »

Every now and then, just to boost the excitement in their marriage, Mr. Coach likes to coach Mrs. Coach. She is still new to the world of competent swimming – which is to be distinguished from the world of survival swimming which she experienced as a child in an East Coast town where there were no pools so she had to learn how to swim with the jelly fish and horseshoe crabs. As a result, she entered adulthood able to swim but with form best described as "paranoid." However, a serious injury suffered a couple years ago brought her daily… more »

Kicking. There probably aren’t many swim teams left on the planet that don’t begin their season with copious amounts of kicking. And there probably isn’t a faster way to clear space in the lanes than to heave a couple hundred thousand yards of kicking at a team. Mr. Coach’s team is currently in the full throes of Kick-mania (or "Thinning the Herd," as Mrs. Coach sometimes calls it). You’ve got your sprint kick sets and your longer, anaerobic-threshold kick sets. Your kicking drill sets, your vertical kicking, your going-right-into, your intervals, descendings and your "I could be watching Oprah and… more »

Is anyone else out there nervous about Michael Phelps’s appearance tomorrow night on Saturday Night Live? Sure, he did a heap of good for the sport with all those gold medals, world records and overall good sportsmanship, but you realize of course he could destroy the entire sport tomorrow night. Oh, no, you people read the Internet. You KNOW what some of those Anonymous Cowards are going to do to him (and us, by association) if he so much as flubs one line or flashes those famous bicuspids when he shouldn’t. It’ll be all, "Sure, Michael Phelps can swim faster… more »

Let’s face it: Bon Appetit magazine is never going to devote an issue to the food found at swim meets. But that doesn’t stop anyone from eating at swim meets, least of all Mrs. Coach. However she has noticed that the further down the totem pole you go in meet size, the better the food gets. It’s almost like an incentive to never get a legal breaststroke. Your national and international-level meets are probably the worst when it comes to what’s available at the concession stands. You’ve got your bloated, boiled hot dogs, your overly salty nacho chips with melted… more »

(Or: Why Mothers Develop Nervous Tics) Earlier this summer, Mrs. Coach had to fetch Little Mr. Coach from a swim camp that he and his father attended. Mr. Coach was booked to coach all three sessions of the camp, but Little Mr. Coach had to return home early for his summer swim league championships. So, after a brisk 10-hour drive, Mrs. Coach arrived at the swim camp and headed for the campus natatorium where the last training session of the day was going on. Picture, if you will, this scene: Mrs. Coach walking onto the pool deck just in time… more »

Parents sometimes ask Mrs. Coach what Mr. Coach looks for when he recruits a potential collegiate athlete. Talk about your loaded questions. But sometimes, depending on how manic the gleam is in those parents’ eyes, Mrs. Coach will actually tell them. 1. The Ability to Fly Solo: Mrs. Coach can still remember the day when Mr. Coach came home so excited about a visiting recruit he couldn’t stop grinning. "Are her times that good?" she asked him. "They’re very good," he replied, "but even better – she came alone." "What do you mean she came alone?" Mrs. Coach asked him,… more »

Because Mr. Coach coaches both men and women, people sometimes ask him (or Mrs. Coach if she’s standing closer) which gender he prefers to coach. Mrs. Coach thinks that, if Mr. Coach HAD to make a choice between the two, he might choose the female of the species and the reasons have nothing to do with anything sleazy. If you’ve seen one scantily clad female with overdeveloped trapezius muscles, you’ve seen them all. It’s just that when you figure you spend 95 percent of your time with an athlete in practice and not meet situations, and one of those genders… more »

Every day, Mr. Coach shows his gratitude to the athletes in his life by swimming the living snot out of them. Fortunately for him, they’re a lot kinder when they show him their gratitude. Often, at season’s end, they show their gratitude with restaurant gift certificates (and free babysitting, always clutch). Once it was tickets for him and Mrs. Coach to see a Broadway touring production of "Les Miserables" (if there was a subliminal message with that one, they’re ignoring it). Even after they graduate, Mr. Coach’s swimmers keep expressing gratitude for his having swum the living snot out of… more »

One of the risks of being a swimmer in a swim-coach family is that your coaching parent is friends with the officials. Now most people might say, "Oh, but that’s great! Officials are the most powerful people at a swim meet! Knowing the officials must be a definite plus!" You would think. But Mrs. Coach vividly remembers the first time her son, Little Mr. Coach, swam a 100 IM. Now, mind you, Little Mr. Coach was only six years old at the time so Mr. and Mrs. Coach’s expectations were not high. But he and all his 8 & Under… more »

There are no words more beautiful in a swim-coach family than these: a new pool. Imbued with the sweet scent of hope that only a UV air-purification system can deliver and able to erase the memory of unidentifiable rashes like a diatomaceous-earth filter, a new pool is a harbinger of better things to come in any swim-coach family. The swim-coach family will say to themselves, "This is going to be the year that Daddy finally kicks the Singulair habit." Or maybe they’ll say, "This is the year that the guys from the local OSHA office stop calling and asking if… more »

The first time Mrs. Coach ever went to a swim meet was on her honeymoon. In Fort Lauderdale. As part of the annual Swim Coaches’ Forum, which has been held since like 1857 at the International Swimming Hall of Fame pool complex. And, oh yeah, she was staying in a hotel with about 30 college students and their coach, her new husband. As Mrs. Coach looks back now on her decision to elope on Christmas Eve and then spend the first couple weeks of married life with a bunch of chlorine-impaired, hormonally-charged, voraciously-hungry social degenerates whose idea of welcoming the… more »