Growing People

You’ve come a long way. You started a team, built up the numbers, organized the groups and assistant coaches well, practices essentially run themselves and meets are almost always full of fun and fast swimmers. But none of this will get your name on the side of a pool. When you are gone, you will be remembered as someone who can help you swim faster. But after a couple months or years, no one will remember who you are. This is because swimming fast will always be infinitely less important than what kind of person you develop.

In order for you to gain your swimmer’s, parent’s and coach’s trust you need competence and good intentions. Everything we discussed beforehand in Part 2 covers competence. Now we are going to work on your good intentions. This is equally, if not more important to how well you run a practice or coach at a meet. In fact, it feeds directly into those activities and will quickly separate you from the fakers.

Coaching Style

What you will be remembered for as a coach is how you grow the people around you. For your team, that means growing the swimmers, but also your assistant coaches and parents. Everyone who is part of your team will eventually leave. When that happens, you want them to leave with something they can apply to other aspects of their lives. They want to be improved as people, or at least that’s what you want for them.

Your leadership effectiveness is going to depend a lot on your leadership style. And, since you work with such a heterogenous group of people, being able to change your style and control your responses will allow you to stay an effective leader. That’s a little confusing, let’s break this down.

If you ask 10 leadership experts what their definition of leadership is, you would get about 12 different answers. Leadership boils down to different versions of getting the people around you to achieve a goal. When your goal is to grow the people around you into better swimmers, coaches and parents, your leadership effectiveness is reflected in how well you are bringing about these changes.

Tangent: “The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” – Ronald Reagan

There are many different types of leadership and they each have an environment where they are most effective. You will naturally lean towards a certain leadership type, but because we live in different environments (practice, meets, board meetings…) and deal with different groups of people (swimmers, coaches and parents), being able to change your leadership style will help keep you as effective as possible. Here are some of the most common leadership styles and their descriptions:

Obviously, we think the situational type is best, which is another way of saying you should be ALL of the styles. It just depends who and what you are dealing with. Here is the proper breakdown:

Be autocratic with young age groupers. As kids grow and their brains mature, they slowly switch from acting on instinct and feeling to being more conscientious and thought driven. That’s why when dealing with younger swimmers (about 10 and under), you don’t want to negotiate and sit back. You need to be very authoritarian and just say how things are going to be. If you let the kids run the show, they will run you over. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun and be friendly, it just means that up front you need to make sure they know who the boss is. This will speak to their limbic system (emotional center) and give them a respect for your authority.
Be Laissez-faire/Democratic with older, more experienced swimmers. As kids grow, they become much more aware of both their own bodies and their goals. By this stage, anyone still left in the pool is there because they want to be and they want to get better. If you are always on their case or micro-manage every detail of their swimming (like you would with younger swimmers), they will feel pupated instead of free. Your goal here is to set the boundaries, but let the kids have more of a say in how they swim and train. We will dive much deeper in keeping this group motivated in a bit.
Be transformational with young assistant coaches. Your assistant coaches should be extensions of both yourself and the team culture you are trying to build. In order to have that kind of trust in them, you need to take the time to educate them on how to do their jobs well and how to inspire their swimmers. Many new hires we work with are happy to sit on the sidelines and watch swimming instead of work towards creating a strong team. This “push” needs to come from you as the head coach.
Be charismatic at swim meets. While you can totally mix this quality into everyday training, it needs to be especially evident at swim meets. Most swimmers show up to swim meets tired from an early morning wake up or worried about their upcoming events. By being a bubbly, happy and excited coach you can spread that fun atmosphere around. Meets should be fun no matter when in the season they are happening or how fast people are swimming. There is always something to improve and be excited about.
Be bureaucratic/servant-like with parents. Remember that you run an organization and a business. This requires a bit of administrative work and having good policies and rules in place will help everyone who is a part of the organization be on the same page (or at least have a written reference for when things go wrong). Your parents are the customers of this organization and like any other business, your job is in part to serve your customers. That doesn’t mean giving into every demand, it just means that you shouldn’t forget who pays for your opportunity to coach and that parents deserve to be treated like they are a valued member of the team.

Most coaches who get in trouble (fired) treat parents and coaches like their swimmers. They don’t compartmentalize their behavior and leadership style. By being a slightly different person in different circumstances, you will maintain maximum leadership effectiveness and make the biggest life impact on the people around you.

How do you know if what you are doing is having an impact? How do you know if your leadership is effective? The simplest way is to ask your swimmers, coaches and parents whether your leadership is effective! Ask for feedback. Not only will this give you direct advice on what is going well and what is not, but it will show that you CARE, that you care enough to put yourself out there and ask how you can be better for your team. Nothing will make you a better leader than you showing that you want to be a better coach/swimmer/parent. A simple, non-confrontational, autonomous way of gathering data about yourself is questionnaires and ratings. Come up with a list of qualities you strive for and email out a link to a survey, asking your swimmers, parents and coaches how you are doing. Here are a few questions you can include and have your team rate you on each subject from 1-5 stars:

Overall, how do you rate my leadership?
Do you think we have a team culture?
Do you feel you are growing as a person on this team?
Do you feel your skills are improving as a swimmer?
Would you recommend a friend to join the team?
As an assistant coach, do you feel I help you improve your coaching skills?
As a parent, do you feel your kids are just here to be better swimmers or better people?
…

Now that we know how to lead people to where we want them to go… where exactly are we going? Let’s dive a bit deeper into those questions and thoughts and break it down by group: swimmers, coaches and parents.

Growing Swimmers (As People)

We are not going to tell you what kind of person you should develop on your team. Our only goal is to push you to think and act on actually taking the time to develop kids outside the pool. This will look differently on every pool deck, but there should be something to look at in the very least.

In school, teachers have a set curriculum they have to follow or a test they have to prepare their students for. On the pool deck, it is a blessing and a curse that we don’t have quite the formal structure. It’s great that each coach has the freedom to talk and teach whatever they want. But without a written plan (curriculum) or a final exam to prep for, we can sometimes be unmotivated to go out of the way and teach our kids life lessons.

The trick is to be teaching yourself, and then sharing and incorporating what you learned into your weekly training schedule. You will have to set aside that time just like you make a budget. If it’s not on paper, it won’t happen.

So, what should we be teaching? We actually hit this in Part 1 where we talked about Performance skills and Moral skills. Here is the chart to remind you:

In Part 1, we focused on how building character feeds into a process that produces our results. Now, let’s take a few minutes to focus on those skills that help make good character. By having them split into performance and moral skills, it gives a little more framework to work off of when learning and teaching these topics. In addition, you can easily add to this list. For instance, in the performance skills category you can add sports related education like exercise science, nutrition and sports psychology. For moral skills, learning about grit, swimming sports history and becoming a self-actualized person under the Maslow Pyramid (if you’re brave) are all great topics every coach/leader should be familiar with and teach others about.

There are endless resources out there to help you improve yourself as a coach and to provide continuous topics to teach your swimmers. We mentioned a few in Part 1 and below is the list again with some additions for performance skills topics:

Performance Skills

Coaches Idea Exchange group on Facebook
Coach Jason Pullano (and his Gamify Group) on Facebook
com newsletter
Swim Like A. Fish for technique
Ritter Sports Performance for dryland
tv for swimming drills
American and International Swim Coach’s Associations (ASCA/ISCA)
Swimming Science on Facebook
Swim Smart free download-ables
The Biology of Swimming book or course (shameless plug!)

Moral Skills

Proactive Coaching page on Facebook
Drive by Daniel Pink
Start with Why and The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek (also follow on Facebook)
Grit by Angela Duckworth
The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey
12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan Peterson
Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success - By John Wooden and Jay Carty
Wooden - John Wooden with Steve Jamison
They Call Me Coach - John Wooden
The Vision of a Champion - By Dorrance/ Avebuch
Shaken - By Tim Tebow
Creating Magic - By Lee Cockerell
The Boys In The Boat - Daniel James Brown
Atomic Habits - By James Clear

There are many more valuable resources out there and you may not find the ones on this list valuable to you and which is fine. The key is to find something that makes you think, challenges you to be better and share those thoughts regularly with your swimmers. Instead of going through all these listed resources and giving a summary, let’s just pick one as an example and play it out in real life.

In a world with everything at our fingertips and instant gratification, developing “grit” has become the most important skill any person can develop. The first step in making this a teaching priority for your swimmers is for you (the coach) to be aware of the topic. Now that you read that last sentence, you are aware.

Next, you need to learn about grit yourself, and the expert in the field is Dr. Angela Duckworth, a PhD who studied the idea of grit and summarized her lifelong experiments in her book called Grit. The simplest thing to do now is read the book and as you go along, summarize and share what you learn with your swimmers on a weekly basis. Teach them that the idea of grit has been around for decades but has resurfaced in the science community. Teach them that grit is the drive to chase a dream DESPITE setbacks and years of commitment. Teach that grit was studied in kids training for the spelling bee and recruits at West Point Academy and that it explained more of who would be successful than either grades or socioeconomic status.

Better yet, turn the team into a book club! Have them read one chapter a week and spend a few minutes a week talking about what we all learned. Make it part of your goal sheet. What are we going to do to improve our grit? It can even be a team goal and a theme for the season.

Ok, that’s a lot of work. At the very least, you can show Dr. Duckworth’s TED talk as well as many others about sports psychology, habits of successful people and developing a character that leads to the team culture you want to build. For instance, developing trust among your athletes is another character feature that can improve team culture. Here are some tips from Steven Covey’s book The Speed of Trust:

Talk Straight. Say what you truly mean. Don't "spin" the truth and don't lie.
Demonstrate Respect. Show you truly care about people, even if they can do nothing for you. Don't disrespect people or hide that you care.
Create Transparency. Be open and honest. Don't withhold information, create illusions, or pretend.
Right Wrongs. Admit your mistakes and repair them. Don't get defensive or cover up mistakes.
Show Loyalty. Be respectful to those absent and give others credit. Don't badmouth others behind their backs or sell people out.
Deliver Results. Get things done. Don't overpromise and under deliver.
Get Better. Constantly improve your skills. Don't deteriorate or force every problem into one solution.
Confront Reality. Confront the undiscussables and shoot the elephants in the room. Don't bury your head in the sand or skirt around the real issues.
Clarify Expectations: Find out what others want in terms of goals, wants, and needs. Don't assume you know what others’ expectations are and don't be vague about your own goals.
Practice Accountability. Take responsibility and make others take responsibility as well. Don't just say, "It's not my fault!," or immediately point fingers at others without them explaining their side of things.
Listen First. Find out what people want before giving them advice or responding in a one-sided manner. Don't think you have all of the answers and don't make policies or rules for people you don't even know.
Keep Commitments. Set out to finish what you said you'd start by the time you were supposed to finish. Don't make and break promises.
Extend Trust. Give trust to others to empower them. Don't be untrustworthy of others, but also don't be so overtrusting that you become gullible.

Putting your swimmer’s growth on the calendar and talking about important life directing topics is a great start and if you do only that, you will be well ahead of 90% of other coaches. But if you want to take it to the next level, getting your kids involved in the community in real life will force them to see their character in action.

You can start small by having your kids help and serve other sports by providing timers, event setup and event cleanup. Having your older swimmers provide free swim lessons for younger students in the community is another way to both get your kids to feel they own their club as well as recruit and grow the team for the future. If you are looking for another way to serve, volunteering at the local homeless diner, nursing homes or packing food for the impoverished are easy and always available ways to serve. In addition, forcing your swimmers to serve those who have less will give them much needed perspective! What’s a 200 fly in the face of being homeless and needing to go to the local diner every day just to get a bite to eat? Serving will help build an appreciation for the opportunity to train hard and race fast every time.

No one is asking swimmers to fix the world’s problems, but we do ask them to make the most of every opportunity they are given. At the very least when they leave your team, you will know they are the kind of people who can tackle the world’s problems when their time comes. And when they do, they will remember you as the mentor who helped them become that strong.

Growing Coaches

Everything we have talked about up to this point and what we will talk about in Parts 3 and 4 are meant for head coaches and people looking to make coaching their career and planning to (or hoping to) end up in a head coaching position. Assuming you are or will reach this level of leadership, you have an opportunity to teach and mentor your assistant coaches. This can take a lot of extra effort that you are not necessarily expected to do or paid to do, but here are several reasons why you should do it:

Your assistant coaches are an extension of you and your coaching style. They can’t read your mind, so if you never sit them down and explain how you like practice to be run, how you like freestyle taught, how you like to build team culture… they won’t know.
By having a common language and set of drills throughout the entire team, you can help build team culture and a team identity everyone can relate to. If every coach is doing their own thing, it can feel like there are multiple teams that happen to train at the same pool.
Build redundancy and resiliency in your team. In case a coach is sick or can’t make it to practice, it becomes much easier to fill the gaps between different coaches if everyone has the same goal, expectations, coaching style and language to keep training uninterrupted and focused.
By building effective and trustworthy coaches, you can send them out into the world to start satellite clubs in the towns around you and grow your own team exponentially. Think of it like local franchising where the person in charge was trained and educated by you! This gives your entire team more swimmers to compete with, more officials to help run meets and more dues to fund the team.
You will eventually leave the team. Whether you retire or take a new job, your time on the team is limited. When you leave, you want to know you built something that will last. If you leave behind a group of inexperienced coaches who weren’t pushed to be better, your old team will inevitably suffer and fail. Don’t leave that kind of legacy behind, work to make the team resilient enough to work without you there.

Now that we have gone over the reasons why you should grow coaches, now we can talk about how to do it in real life. Just like with your swimmers, you need to set aside time on a regular basis (weekly or monthly) to meet with you coaches. During this meeting, you should do three things:

Gather information to find out how you can improve and educate. When gathering information, ask how the team is running on a day to day basis. Are there swimmer or parent complaints? Are practices running smoothly? etc.

Next, ask what you can do for your coaches. What do they need in order to do their jobs better? Show that you want to serve them and help them improve how they do their work.

Finally, take the time to educate them. Just like you do with your swimmers, find a subject you think your coaches generally struggle with and try to address it. With young new coaches, you can focus on how to teach the strokes or how to write workouts. As they progress, teach them how to build and manage a team, run practice, behave at meets… just like we talked about earlier.

Finally, work on their leadership skills and help them improve the way they develop their swimmers as people just like you are developing your coaches as people.

This is a good spot to pause and give another real-life example. Let’s say you want to teach your coaches how to improve their motivational skills. Like we did with teaching grit to our swimmers, we must first start with finding a good resource and an authority to learn from. The book Drive by Daniel Pink is a great start. Although geared towards corporations and businesses, the findings of the book are widely applicable.

The premise of the book is that the old “carrot and stick” method of motivating employees (or in this case, swimmers) by offering rewards for good work or punishment for bad work is outdated and de-motivating. These “extrinsic” motivators don’t work in the 21^st century.

Instead, Pink shows how research teaches us that there are three main components to building and maintaining motivation: Purpose, Autonomy and Mastery. As you teach these concepts to your coaches, you can have them read the book itself or you can teach them from it. Don’t try to do too much at once, take your time and tackle each section on its own. In addition, always try to make or challenge your coaches to make real-life applicable changes for their swimmers using the concepts they learn.

We have already talked about building purpose on your team extensively in Part 1, so we won’t beat it over the head much more. But again, this is our starting point for why we get out of bed in the early mornings to jump in a cold pool. Building character, building a team, being better today than yesterday, leaving a legacy, chasing team goals, improving the community… are all great purposes. Personally, my favorite way of building purpose in the team is to have the older kids regularly teach the younger ones. About once every two weeks, we hold a practice where everyone comes at the same time. The older kids are given a set of stations to run and the younger kids divide up in smaller groups and rotate between the stations practicing certain drills, turns or dives.

This forces the older kids to feel like they are leaving a legacy, to have a bigger purpose for being on the team than just swimming fast. It also helps them think more deeply about their own technique and swimming when they are challenged to help a struggling kiddo. The younger kids feel included in the big kid’s world and they aspire to improve and join the big kids someday. The parents also love these interactions and consistently rate these as the kid’s favorite practices.

Let’s move on to building autonomy. Giving employees more autonomy in business settings was shown to improve the work lives of employees and develop new innovations more rapidly. Now, many large companies like 3M and Google give their employees 20% free time during work hours to work on whatever project they want with whoever they want. This generated many of the innovations we use every day like Gmail.

In the swimming setting, we have to balance team structure/organization with pure autonomy and time off. Kids tend not to use their time wisely which is why they benefit and appreciate structure in their lives. For this reason, autonomy can look differently for different aged kids. For the youngest group, Novice 8 and unders, they will have the least freedom. Maybe just some choice in fun relays, but no real time off and no choice stroke or drill.

For our Age group kids from 9-12 years old, you can write up multiple versions of a set and let the group choose what they want to do. This way they have a bit of autonomy, but you still control the major factors in their training. And, you get to save the sets they didn’t choose for later!

For the oldest of swimmers, 13 years and up, we can start scheduling real free time where the kids can work on any weakness they think they have. It may feel wrong to “waste” time like this, but the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term losses.

The final piece of the puzzle is mastery. No one likes to do something they are bad at, and no one likes to continue working towards something that isn’t improving. This is why many kids quit the sport as they get older. At some point they start plateauing and they feel a sharp loss of motivation. How can we overcome this? In addition, when we only have one or two chances a year to go best times, how can we continually show improvement and mastery of our craft throughout the season? Well, just because your times aren’t improving doesn’t mean there isn’t something or someone to improve. As coaches, we can help show kids their progress by creating sets that continuously build on themselves and progressively get harder and harder as the season goes on. Here are some examples for the older kids:

Tangent: Just because you are not improving doesn’t mean the team doesn’t need you. You can still help the others on your team improve. Life isn’t always about you!

For younger swimmers who are going to go best times almost every time they hit the water, we need to instill a strong commitment to technique improvement. You can use a tool like the Perfect Set throughout the season to continuously improve mastery of swimming. The Perfect Set is simply 10 x 50s on a slow interval everyone can make. During the set, there is one or two techniques that have to be performed PERFECTLY by everyone in the group, like streamlines off each wall. If one person fails, the whole group restarts the set! As the season goes on, the desired perfection can get harder and harder: specific stroke count, number of dolphin kicks per wall, breathing pattern…etc.

Can you imagine how well your team would run if all your assistant coaches pushed and mastered these concepts of motivation? Burnout is not a result of hard work. Kids quit when they lose one or more of these three elements of motivation. Make those a focus of your training, and the kids and parents will stick around.

Taking the time to improve and grow your coaches will take some initial investment, but over time it will create a team that essentially runs itself. You want to get to a point where you can leave the pool deck for a few weeks and when you come back, everything will be just the way you left it. Parents are happy and feel served. Kids are excited to come to practice and work hard. The club is growing and running fun fast swim meets. And best of all, your coaches aren’t even thinking about leaving or looking for another job because they feel they have purpose, autonomy and mastery on your swim team.

Growing Parents

As we said before, parents are one of the groups of people that make up your team. Since they are part of your team, you get to help them grow as people too. The problem most coaches have is that they don’t feel like they get a lot of respect from parents.

Let’s be real for a second. Being a swim coach, even a lifelong professional career coach, doesn’t get you any letters after your name like MD or PhD. Chances are the parents who put their kids in swimming do have letters like that behind their names. Parents like that do not automatically give respect. They think you are “just a coach.” Some even think you are a “glorified babysitter.” We know that’s not true, but unfortunately there is no four-year degree in coaching and there is no organization that can bestow certifications and honors that a parent will accept as proof of your leadership skills and value.

You have to gain their trust the old-fashioned way. You have to prove you are worthy of it. You do this by taking the education and growth of both the parents and their kids seriously. As you build a reputation among the parents already on your team, they will give praising reviews to incoming parents and your job of maintaining their trust will become easier and easier as you go along.

Let’s start from the beginning. Imagine you had a brand-new parent join the team. They didn’t grow up swimming, they have no idea what swim team is, they have never been to a three-day prelim/final meet but their kid was invited and loves to swim. How are we going to turn this land parent into a swim parent? How are we going to prove that we run an organization built to grow their child in character through swimming? How are we going to include this parent into the team so both the parent and kid stick it out for the long haul? We are going to write it all down and share it with them piece by piece.

People respect things that are written down. The more you can put your rules, regulations, policies and expectations down on paper or in an email, the more you have something to share and teach, and the more you have something to fall back on if something goes wrong. Here is a list of items you should consider having on your website. You can find a download of all these documents in generic form for free on our website: https://www.swimsmarttoday.com/products/download-ables. Feel free to use it as a base or guideline to develop your own!

Of course, just because you have something on your website, doesn’t mean the parents will read it. Take the time to create some on-boarding emails for new parents to highlight what to expect from being on the swim team and what is expected of them. In fact, many teams create a handbook or policies and rules for the parents to look over and keep so that everyone is on the same page.

Here is an example of a first impression on-boarding email:

Hello and welcome to Swim Team!

We are so excited to have you join our team. We pride ourselves on creating an atmosphere and culture that everyone wants to be a part of and are excited you are here to help us build that legacy.

While swimming and racing are a large part of what we do, we believe our most important job is helping your child grow in character. This character feeds into their process (training) which produces results (fast swimming). Here is a summary of our core beliefs:

Our Vision (purpose): Creating people we want living in our world.

Our Mission (method): Using swimming as a way to teach life lessons that lead to hard work, dedication… and fast swimming!

As a parent, we consider you a part of this team! We want you to gain as much from being part of our swim family as your child. Please read the full parent handbook for complete details on how the team operates and what you can expect from coaches and swimmers as well as what we expect from our parents.

In the meantime, all you have to do is show up early to practice and learn along the way. Ask other parents and always feel free to ask coaches any questions you might have.

Thanks, and welcome to the Swim Team!

You could send several such emails slowly expanding on a variety of subjects such as:

How to behave at swim meets for parents and kids
How practice is run
Explaining what coaches do
How the team is structured
Plans for team expansion
Send videos and books for parents to watch with their kids
Nutrition for swimmers
Etc…

Why put the effort into sending all these emails? Firstly, parents generally don’t pay attention to the happenings of the swim team until it’s too late. This is your chance to get ahead of the game. Secondly, it shows you care and that you put in real effort outside the pool. If all parents see is what you do at the pool, they will start wondering why they pay so much for you to sit around all day for 3 hours of work in the evening. If you don’t tell them you are running an organization most of the day and on the weekends as well, they won’t know better. Lastly, this is your opportunity to grow the parents!

Parenting and coaching share a lot of similarities. What you learn on deck and what parents learn at home from this demanding job can be shared as the parents and coaches team up to give the best teaching for the kids. You can help parents grow by sharing with them what you see in the kids. You want to improve your swimmer’s character, just like parents do. Since you spend so much time with swimmers (probably more than parents do) you have the chance to share things with parents about their kids they may not know about. Naughty behavior, lack of discipline, mistreating teammates, being selfish… all of these things you could work on by yourself, or you can incorporate the parents’ help. And by doing so, you improve the parents’ parenting abilities as well.

As parents grow with the club and become more a part of the swimming family, you can now push them to serve the team in a bigger way. Good swim teams run on an army of awesome parent volunteers. Many of these jobs require hours of training and hours more in volunteering and running swim meets. It’s not a small favor to ask. If parents don’t feel that they are needed or that their efforts won’t benefit their kid, they won’t help. But, getting parents to volunteer as officials, meet referees and hospitality managers helps parents grow as people more than they realize and they will appreciate the experience later.

Tangent: The best view of the swimmers is from on-deck officiating!

For new parents, you will really need to hold their hand. They have no idea what the expectations are for them. They will often do things that are even against USA Swimming or club rules and most often it is out of ignorance rather than choice. Here are several important topics you should share early on with new parents:

On deck behavior: Parents are welcome on deck, but should sit far away and not interfere with practice. This is for both safety and character building. At least by USA Swimming rules, non-certified and non-background checked persons are not allowed on deck for the safety of the kids. You can’t guarantee who is or is not a parent/relative, so staying off deck is a way to keep strangers at bay. It is also good for the kids to learn how to own their own world. When the parent safety net disappears, kids learn to rely on themselves and their abilities to get them through tough situations. This builds confidence and resilience. Yes, the kids will fail and parents should learn to let them do so!
Don’t give technical advice: Even if you were once or currently are a stellar swimmer, don’t try to change the technique of your child directly. If anything, speak with the kid’s coach about suggestions you have. Otherwise, leave it up to the coaches and swimmers to make progress on technique. Often times, coaches have a long-term developmental plan and interference from multiple sources can have a “too many cooks in the kitchen” effect. Research even shows that kids don’t want technical advice from parents and this can lead to higher chances of quitting a sport!
Focus on the process, not the result: A lot of parents can be very competitive and want to live vicariously through their children. They want their kids to do well and beat so and so person or so and so time. This detracts from the character building and promotes selfishness. These swimmers tend not to last long in the sport, especially when they separate from their parents in college. If you want kids to grow in the ways that matter, the numbers can’t be the priority.
Swim meet behavior: When your kid gets done with a race and comes over to you, first ask if they have spoken with their coach. If no, then send them to their coach to debrief about the race. If yes, then say something supportive like “I love watching you swim” or “You looked like you did your best.” Do NOT say things like “You need to fix X, Y and Z” or “If you tried harder you would have beaten that person or time.”
Team culture is more important than individual performance: Make it clear that families who are accepted on the team are now part of a multi-generational club. Their kid’s (and parent’s) behavior is viewed and imitated by many. If it does not improve the culture, it will not be welcome on the team. Make it clear that drama won’t be tolerated or allowed to seep into future generations.

Just voicing and making clear these few expectations is going to save you so much headache and jump start a positive, character building, culture dynasty on your team! Of course, always give parents and kids the benefit of the doubt and try to correct toxic behavior. But at the same time, be ready to cut off the bad apples, even if they are the fastest kids/families on your team. Don’t sacrifice the future for the present.

Remember, parents are your paying customers and word of mouth reviewers. If you serve your parents, help them grow and provide a team culture where their kids can grow and happen to swim fast, they will tell their friends and your team will grow. Don’t fight parents, get them on your side and your team will essentially run itself ;)

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