My Swim Coach is Ted Bundy pt 6

This blog may or may not have something to do with my swim coach, but I’m going to talk about swim and I couldn’t think of a title so that’s the one I picked.

Last night was senior night at swim and after having had two I would like to discuss their differences. The one I had for cross country was kind of sad because it was a reminder that the last race of my season this year would probably be the last time I compete in running which was a sad thing. It was also a reminder that I would be leaving a bunch of people I really enjoyed spending time with in less than a year.

Swim senior night on the other hand was quite different. For a couple of reasons. The first being that the coach makes me so very angry always and I will not miss swimming his atrocious practices. I also won’t miss 90% of the people on the team because we just never get the chances to bond since we’re always half drowned during the time we are together. The 10% of the people I will miss I get to see outside of practices anyway, so it’s not like the end of the season will come and they will fall off the face of the planet. And I still have club swimming, so the end of this season will not be the last time I compete.

What will be sad is my last time at swim championships in March. I’ve been going to this meet for the last ten years for my various club teams, and this is my favorite pool to swim in. It’s where I did my first 200 fly at 12 years old (because my father wanted to torture me) and it’s where I broke 6 minutes for the first time in my 500 free. It’s also one of the only times I ever get to see my swim friends.

I was on a club team called the FINS for nine years, but when my dad had to start working most days in Rhode Island, they couldn’t find another head coach to take the practices he left open and the team had to fold. Most of the kids I knew on the team went to other clubs in the area, and my two best friends went to a club called Executive. I wanted to go with them, but Executive has a required number of practices that a swimmer has to attend, and because I wanted to do cross country and not fail everything in school, I had to go to a different club.

I still see one of my close friends periodically. We meet up for lunch about every month or so, and my team swam against hers this year for high school in a cross over meet. But our other friend Amy moved away for private school so we don’t see her as much anymore. But we will see here and a lot of the other kids who were on the FINS at the championship meet in March. But that’s the last time I’ll probably see them. Most likely for the rest of my life since I’ll be in college and not able to attend the meet and then they’ll go to college and it’ll just get harder and harder to stay in touch.

But let’s go back to high school swim because this is making me sad. I think my coach just says things when he doesn’t know the actual facts in a way that makes it sound like he knows what’s going on. For example, last year we did our senior ceremony in the middle of the meet and the juniors all decorated the pool before the meet started.

This year he sent out an email saying that the ceremony would be at the beginning of the meet because “it’s tradition” which is just untrue so I’m very confused on where he got that. I think he wanted it to be at the start of the meet, which is fine, but why whip out a “it’s tradition” when the juniors and seniors on the team all know that it is not tradition? We would’ve done it at the beginning if he said it would be more efficient, but when you say “it’s tradition” and we know it’s not tradition then we just get mad for no reason.

Also he tried to force us onto the pool deck before all the seniors had arrived because we needed to warm up. It was 20 minutes before warm ups started, and a tradition the team does have is that all the seniors walk into the last meet together. Then he got mad at us which was funny.

Also he didn’t let Ashleigh read the senior superlatives she made up, which was tragic because they were hilarious.