Why do I need the “Team” part of swimming?

Why be part of a swim team? Can't you just go to your local YMCA or swimming pool by yourself, train yourself, sign up for swim meets by yourself, race by yourself? Why do you need to pay a coach hundreds of dollars a month? Why do you need to show up to practice at a certain time and share the lane with many other swimmers? How does this benefit you? 

It turns out, if you want to be the fastest swimmer you can be, you can't do that on your own. And better yet, it helps you on your swimming journey if you try to bring other people along with you. That is why it is essential to be part of a swim team.

The Navy Seals are considered one of the best military groups in the world. More than 80% of those who attempt the training to qualify fail. When drill instructors are asked who survives seal team training, they say it is not the most athletic or the smartest or the most experienced who make it. It is the person who, in the midst of their exhaustion, hunger and sleep deprivation managed to encourage and lead the people around them to continue on and persevere in the training.

Swimming, like Navy Seal training, can really sucks sometimes. The water is cold, the mornings are early, the swim meets are long, you have to use your muscles in ways they are not designed to be used and you can't even breathe whenever you want. On top of that, unlike other sports which are performed on hard surfaces and under the influence of gravity, swimming is very gentle on the human body. What this means is that a swimmer can train for almost a limitless time. Runners, football players, weightlifters all have to spend a lot of their time just recovering from their own training. This almost does not exist for swimmers.

If all you did was care about yourself and swam for yourself, then when the hard times come, and you don't feel like getting up at 5:00 a.m. for the third day in a row to jump in a freezing pool…you will quit. If you quit on yourself, you are the only one who suffers. If you are the only one who suffers, you may choose the easy way out and stay in your own bed.

However, if you are part of a team and your team is depending on you to perform at your best, to train at your best, and to show up for that 5:00 a.m. practice, you will push yourself a lot harder for the sake of not letting the team down. The best athletes in the world are built on the best teams in the world.

While it may seem counterintuitive to spend your energy trying to make the people around you better (and possibly faster than you), it turns out that if you want to reach the highest of your goals you should adopt a personality which cares about the team.

We think that it should be a coach's priority to build this team culture, but you should also take responsibility for creating a team that everybody wants to be on. Your time in swimming is limited. Eventually, you will leave the pool deck and move on to bigger things. At the end of this journey, you won't remember most of the races or practices you’re a part of. The only thing that will matter are the friends you made and the legacy you left behind. 

When you reach the end of your swimming journey, you want people to say they're going to miss you. When you reach the end of your swimming journey, you want to look back and say you lived a real-life adventure that was worth writing about. When you reach the end of your swimming journey, you want to have a group of people that you trained and suffered with who might stay your friends for a very long time. 

If you can do those things, then no matter how your swimming journey ends, not a minute of it will have been wasted!

Now that we know where we are going, we can start to work on how to get there. In the next few chapters, we are going to switch gears and start talking about what you need to know in order to integrate into the swim team and how all this swimming world works.

Swimmer's Starter Guide book here!