It's Alive! It's Out of Control!

by David P. Hillgrove ©copyright 1996

Today, as promised, we'd like to pursue the descriptions of some of the rest of the "happenings" at a swim meet, as well as meet some of our favorite people along the way.

Any questions?

To begin with, as our title implies, a swim meet is a prodigy, simple defined by Webster's as  “a person or thing so extraordinary as to inspire wonder."

It is without question that at some point in your swim-team-parent-career, you will be inspired to ". . . wonder why I said yes to her joining, wonder why I said yes to volunteering, wonder why these things take so dang long . . . " etc.

However, you will also quickly realize that once a swim meet commences, it takes on a life of its own. No one generally knows what direction it will take, or what proportions it will take on to confuse as many folks as possible, but indeed, the swim meet is self-generating and self-absorbing.

Also, it impossible to determine how long a particular meet will last, leaving me to wonder why advanced cat burglars don't research the names and addresses of swim team families for dishonest purposes. Heck, they could easily have enough time to cook a gourmet meal and watch a baseball game on TV before they went about ripping the place off while the family is away at a never-ending swim meet.

This extraordinary time expenditure of a swim team family must be dealt with somehow, and it is here, I believe, that sociologists will find their first real insight about our subculture. It is a scary thought indeed that our entire generation would be judged solely on the data captured from a swim meet’s participants behavior, isn’t it?

First off, there is a LOT of down time for adult and child alike.

Parents, for the most part, use their time-a-waiting very poorly. Some do read thick, trashy novels that describe certain body parts in a variety of ways. Occasionally one will observe a parent taking care of their office work at poolside, what with their briefcase, calculators, cellular phone and ulcer medicine. For the most part, the majority of parents gossip insidiously,  or stare blankly into space, perhaps wondering how fifteen parent volunteers can manage to do the work of the remaining 145 parents.

In general, parents make do with their allotted "dead time", until it is almost the moment for their offspring to compete, at which instant they will be enveloped in an uncontrollable urge to visit the restroom. In doing so, they miss their child's performance, but overcome this under scrutiny by nodding furiously and saying "Nice Job, son" a lot.

Children, on the other hand, find creative ways to utilize their off time in much more efficient manners. To begin with, they must find space within the confines of the swim pool property to lay down a towel to create little "home base" to store their worldly possessions. These are defined as enough loose change to buy enough ice cream and snacks to keep their dentist's car payments on schedule. Then, within two hours of their appointed race, they are herded over to a muster area. Taking a lesson from the Army's philosophy of "Hurry Up and Wait", meet officials have these children congregate to prepare mentally, complete team strategies, and create enough havoc to make even a school bus driver lose her patience.

No, boys have much more important things on their mind: loud noise, rule infringement and physical boisterousness. They punch, they kick, they ninja, they pinch, they noogie, they laugh like heck. And they get yelled at, by the very people who demanded that they sit on the hard benches forty-five minutes prior to their events in the first place.

Then, following chastisement, for at least three minutes, the boys will sit obediently on their bench, observing the girls chanting/singing 300 words per minute and hand slapping in groups of eight even faster, while they are reminded of the real "mission" of young boys. So, they resume punching and laughing and slapping and teasing, until they are either yelled at again, or called to go off and expend that energy in the pool's water.

If anyone ever took the time to ask the boys themselves, one might find out that it is a toss up as to which is more enjoyable: fun time in the muster area, or the racing itself.

But swim meets are all about little boys and girls and their attempts at bettering their personal records. Given that so much of our eleven-week summer vacations are unstructured lessons in idleness, we can feel somewhat thankful for the joys AND headaches of swim meets.

They do certainly point out the true character of some folks, young and old!
 

NEXT: Our final installment looks at volunteers and parental participation!