Swimming

Participation Trophies

/ Jillcoach / 1 Comment

I loved working with teenagers. Even with all the challenges of navigating hormones and high school, they are wonderful, raw, unfiltered humans, still filled with passion and humor and alive-ness that gets bludgeoned out of adults by work and bills and obligations. Teenagers do NOT tolerate bullshit and can smell it a mile away.

Participation trophies: the toxic brainchild of someone, either Boomer or GenX, to smooth the ruffled feathers of a 4 year old who shouldn’t have been in organized sports yet. This pacifier might work OK (I won’t say well) for little tiny kids, to reinforce that showing up and trying deserve acknowledgment, but they need to be phased out by the time kids hit about 8 years old. They catch on pretty quickly that participation ribbons and trophies mean nothing, and by the time they’re teenagers, those expensive little trinkets are being thrown in the trash as soon as Mommy’s back is turned. The “reward for breathing” is bullshit, and every teenager knows it. With teens, giving them praise when they know they don’t deserve it earns you a healthy amount of disrespect and a reputation as a liar. Period.

I’m not going to lie: I was a tough coach. (Or, as the misogynistic moms used to say “mean”. Eyeroll.) I had high expectations, pushed my swimmers to do their best, and absolutely would NOT tell someone they were doing great if I didn’t mean it. As a result, the kids knew when they got praise, it was real and truly meant something. I was honest about the hard work they needed to do to reach their goals and didn’t sugar coat it. There were days when they hated my honesty, and me, but even on those days, they trusted me. They trusted I was telling the truth. They trusted that no matter what, they could count on me. They trusted that even when they were hating me, I was still in their corner.

I think often of those teenagers and what coaching them taught me, and I’ve tried to translate it to what we’re going through right now as adults in this country. Adults still want “no bullshit” people in their lives, and as vile as I personally find our former-soon-to-be-again president, I do see how some equate his constant hateful, tactless, shit-talking to being “no bullshit”. He is awful, but he doesn’t hide it or pretend otherwise. He lies constantly but doesn’t excuse it. He may drown you in an avalanche of manure, but you know where you stand while he’s doing it. For a LOT of people, that’s enough to be able to hang adjectives on him like “honest” or “real”. There’s an old adage: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining—I’m guessing part of the attraction of DJT is that he just tells people he’s pissing on them and doesn’t care.

Democrats, on the other hand, are so busy trying to please everyone that no one trusts them, even when they have good policies. The truth is that most people DO like their policies, when you remove a reference to what party proposes it; the dislike and distrust come in when people know who is behind it. Even the people they’re trying to help don’t trust them. The people pleasing looks like pandering and ends up meaning as much as those participation trophies. They talk big about fighting, but then roll over and show a soft belly in the face of election results that at minimum deserved calls for a recount. They now seem unreliable as well as dishonest, which has undercut every good idea they have.

Here’s the thing: you can have a big tent and a big heart and try to do what’s right for all of America without abandoning being “real”. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Jasmine Crockett are doing it daily, and there are people that voted for them while also voting for DJT…for the same reason! They found them to be genuine, and that means a hell of a lot to people.

Those of us who oppose the direction this country is about to go have a very hard row to hoe ahead, and the first thing that needs to happen is a rebuilding of trust. We have to go back to basics of being genuine and straightforward, and our word meaning something that is true and that people can rely on. Honestly, I think it’s going to come from those of us who have never run for office and tend to be disgusted with the status quo of politics; we will need to step up and change this mess. It is easy to sit in the bleachers and watch and second guess. If we want to achieve a different end than oligarchy and wage slavery, we need to step off the bleachers and suit up.

Just showing up is not enough. If we want the trophy, we absolutely have got to do the hard work and swim the race to win.

Walls Redux

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Revisiting and updating…seemed timely

The wall is a physical barrier that must be dealt with in our sport, but it is also a mental/emotional one.

It is in our nature to slow at a wall, to look up at it, to ponder how to get past it. Our tendency is to assume our path continues on past the wall, following the track we have been on, and that the wall stands in our way. In swim training, we must overcome this mindset:  our path does not continue on, but resumes in another direction. The wall becomes a chance to speed up, to readjust, to jump off and speed away on our new path. The wall is not obstacle, but opportunity.

My other experience with walls is The Wall exercise in team building. After working through a series of smaller challenges with a group where you have (hopefully) ironed out differences, insecurities, communication issues, and trust, you are faced with a final challenge. A huge and intimidating wall that the whole team has to get over. There are no handholds or ways to boost yourself, and it is too tall for even your tallest group member to jump to catch the edge. You MUST work together, using the gifts and talents of the group, to find a way over. It is one of the most initially disheartening things to face, and it is easy to fall into “this is impossible”.

I don’t know how others have experienced this, but our group struggled a bit at first. Several people (myself included) balked because of physical limitations like weight or bad back. Some people balked out of fear, or body image issues, or lack of confidence in their physical abilities. I say we struggled “a bit”, but the truth is that we hemmed and hawed and bickered for probably 15 minutes before we made any attempts to get over. FINALLY, a woman who had been a gymnast as a kid and was all of 5 feet tall, told a couple of the guys to give her a boost. Even pushing her as high as they could, she could only get hands to the top of the wall…but then, using her knowledge of gymnastics and flexibility, she tossed one leg straight up and hooked her foot on the top of the wall and pulled herself over. (To this day, it is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen someone do.)

Once that happened, we were re-energized. Seeing it was believing it, and working together we got everyone over that wall…boosting from the bottom, reaching from the top to catch hands and help pull, shouting encouragement. When the last person came over, we were EUPHORIC. We all felt the lesson in our bones: we had accomplished something that seemed impossible because we worked together. None of us, no matter how talented or accomplished or naturally gifted, could have gotten over that wall alone; success was only possible as a team.

So how does all this philosophical rambling about walls matter in broader context? In preparation for writing this, I looked up the definition for the word wall, and was interested to find this:  an extreme or desperate position or a state of defeat, failure, or ruin. Those of us who supported a different vision of America’s future than the one we’re facing are feeling this deeply right now. We hung our hopes on joy and progress only to run face first into the wall of other people’s fear, prejudice, and apathy. What now, what next? This wall looms over us, and I now stand in front of it, feeling a bit desperate. I cannot see past it to where we go from here.

We can take lessons from both swimming and team building. We can speed toward this wall, and see it for the opportunity it is. We can have the confidence to race at this wall, lower our heads, hold our breath, flip and jump as hard as we can in our new direction. We can remember that we are not alone in this endeavor, and that our way to deal with the wall is in community. Our “team” can succeed where we as individuals will struggle. Our path is on a different course, one that we cannot yet see, but it will be there, and this wall that seems so daunting is our best chance at finding it. The alternative is letting the wall stop us, leaving us stuck in a place we don’t want to be and weren’t trying to get to. Screw that—let’s push off this wall together and see where our new direction takes us.

Fighting my Imposter Syndrome

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The first time my head coach had me run practice for his elite senior group was nerve wracking. The kids didn’t know me well at all, and my mouth went completely dry facing this group of about 25 teenagers, with looks on their faces ranging from uncertainty to skepticism to hostility. Who was I to tell them what to do? Why would anyone want to hear what I had to say? My imposter syndrome raging, I resisted the urge to recite my resume at them and plowed forward.

I’m telling this story mainly because I’m back there again, only this time with venturing into writing and trying to figure out publishing in a social media environment. At the age of nearly 60, learning how to reach people and establish a following is more challenging than that first practice with a new group. NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR WHAT YOU HAVE TO SAY keeps pounding in my head, trying to get me to quit as I have before with my writing.

The thing is: I’m a big believer in paying attention to what the universe puts in your path, and over the last couple weeks I have encountered several blogs, podcasts, and posts where people are talking about everyone needing to use the gifts they have to get us through the next few years. It felt like something was calling me to step up and try again. So here I am, in the face of all my insecurity and imposter syndrome, putting myself out there just in case there is a nugget of something I’ve learned that would help another person navigate their challenges.

Insecurity is debilitating. It drags you back before you even start, constantly whispering to you that it doesn’t matter, no one cares, who would pay attention to you, it’s better to not even try than to try and fail. I saw it so much in the athletes I worked with—why work hard and put myself on the line when I might not win or reach my goal? There is vulnerability in caring and reaching wholeheartedly for what you want, and coming up short can feel awful and devastating. Our insecurity makes us back away from the consequences of trying and failing, but blinds us to the consequences of not trying at all. It makes us defensive and cynical, telling ourselves that our choice or non-choice simply doesn’t matter, that caring is for chumps.

But what is the alternative?

At a macro level, I think we saw the alternative in our last election. Millions of people told themselves “my vote/voice doesn’t matter, why even try, nobody cares anyway, no one wants to hear what I have to say, I’ll just bury my head and protect myself.” The consequences of this choice remain to be seen, but certainly seem to be rolling toward very negative for most Americans.

I don’t know how this journey will go for me, but I do know that I need to try. If what I write helps one person, then throwing myself out here and being vulnerable was worth it. What do I have to lose really? If I never get beyond a follower or two, that will feel embarrassing, but if I give up after two weeks because my insecurity is dragging me back, I will feel worse about myself as a person.

I don’t want to be click-baity…not my style. I want to be authentic and sincere, but maybe that’s not a thing that gets followers. Gotta try anyway, right? Maybe I should put a cat picture on my post to at least get someone to open it.

?????????????

The Level Playing Field

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I think part of why we all love sport so much is that every game, match, or meet starts off even, with everyone having an equal chance to win. Teams of equal size, equal opportunity, the scores all at zero, the playing surface identical…a tableau of possibility and hope that we spectators can pour our emotions into, rejoice or mourn the outcome, then start fresh the next time.

As a coach, the absolute essence of competition was based around the idea that both teams were operating from the same basic framework of rules, events, and number of available lanes, with the only differences being who was on our team and how we chose to use our entries to maximize our chance of doing well. NEVER ONE TIME did any coach try to alter the rules in their favor, eliminate members of my team to gain an advantage, take away my assigned lanes, or outright cheat to win. Imagine your favorite sport:  your team shows up to play, and part of your team is barred from entering. Your scoring area has been reduced while the other team’s is larger. You’d be pissed, right? You’d scream, “NOT FAIR!!!”

That is exactly what is and has been going on in American politics for years. Gerrymandering has reduced the scoring area for Democrats across the country, which to my mind is just flat cheating, despite how “legal” it may be and no matter who is doing it. Writing cheating into law doesn’t make it right, and the concept of the winners getting to draw the districting map for voting was a BAD idea from the start. Gerrymandering has given a huge advantage to Republicans, who are now using that power to further abuse the rules of fair play.

Let’s think about this in terms of the NFL. All of the coaches get together to pass a rule that whoever wins the Superbowl gets to make a rule change that the rest of the league will live under. At the time, the coaches (all being confident in their ability to win the Superbowl) would think this was a great idea, and imagine some minor tweaks they would make. For a few years, the NFC and AFC trade wins, and the changes are relatively benign; then AFC teams win three or four years in a row, and the NFC coaches are disgruntled. A few of them get together, and decide next time one of them wins, they’re going to take advantage of the rule change ability to really make it hard for the AFC to win again. An NFC teams wins, and the rule change that year is that AFC players must play with their ankles tied together during the playoffs and Superbowl. It would be in the rules, but it would make it so no AFC team could ever win the Superbowl again. The level playing field would be gone.

Just this week, Republicans in Tennessee used a violation of a procedural rule (not a LAW, just a rule of behavior in their workplace) as an excuse to expel (not reprimand, EXPEL) members of the House who represent a large, mostly Democratic, portion of Nashville. They used their power to tilt the playing field in their favor and remove their competition and silence their “fans”. This idea offends me to my core. It goes against every single thing I operated under as an athlete and believed in as a coach.

I have to wonder sometimes if any of these Republicans ever played sports. If they did, they’ve certainly forgotten the lessons, and the concept of the level playing field.

If you have to cheat to win, is it really winning? If you have to bully to get your way, are you really strong? I have never understood how the people who do these things can possibly feel as though they’ve achieved something.

A Season of Patience

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For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to harvest.
A time to kill and a time to heal.
A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to cry and a time to laugh.
A time to grieve and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.
A time to embrace and a time to turn away.
A time to search and a time to quit searching.
A time to keep and a time to throw away.
A time to tear and a time to mend.
A time to be quiet and a time to speak.
A time to love and a time to hate.
A time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
(New Living Translation)

We all had plans. Plans to work, plans to play, plans to compete, plans to move. All of that has been interrupted and our lives are on hold for a situation unlike anything we’ve faced before. Are we overreacting? Not reacting enough? Only time will tell.

One of the news stories today is about the postponement of the Olympic games, and my thoughts have been drawn again and again to the swimmers who have been preparing for years. When I heard earlier this week that our local pools were closing, even to the swim teams, postponing the Olympic games was one of my first thoughts. I don’t know other sports, but in our sport, to deny athletes training time in the last few months prior to Trials and the Games is to derail everything they’ve worked for. But there are downsides to a postponement, too…some of those who are ready this year may not be ready next year. Life could intervene for them and they could end up not making the team in 2021 when they might have this year. There is a price to pay either way. It’s a “no win” situation.

There’s been a lot of talk of the economy and costs of closing businesses and shuttering public gatherings. There is a huge cost to these decisions, but again, there is a price to pay either way. The decision makers for the most part are taking into account what the worst case scenario could look like if we do nothing; we thumb our noses at them at our own risk. We don’t know what the right decision will have been until we have the benefit of hindsight, and maybe not even then. For some Olympic athletes and some regular citizens, there is no clear choice. Some will be hurt either way. It’s a “no win” situation.

We are in a season of patience, where we need to wait. Just wait. And wait some more. And try to find the patience to wait it out, find the strength to come out the other side, find the charity to help those who struggle.

For everything there is a season. This is our season of patience.

Fondly,

Coach Jill

In This Moment

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When you’re facing a three hour long practice, or a long race, or the beginning of a grueling season, looking forward can be daunting. Trying to consider all of the possibilities, work to be done, and “what if”s can quickly short circuit your emotional reserve.

I have a series of photos, taken by a team mom, that show me waiting alongside a nervous 7-year-old in the lineup behind the starting blocks for her race. She had worked herself into a frenzy at idea of standing there waiting by herself, worrying over the race, how she would do, what it would feel like. I stayed with her and did my best to keep her just in the moment, talking, joking around, showing her she could talk to the other girls to pass the time.

When the things to worry about get too big or too challenging, the trick I learned (during my divorce) is to shrink things down into manageable bites. That old saying “take it a day at a time” is very true, but sometimes even a day is too big of a bite. Sometimes the mantra is “take it an hour at a time” or even just “this moment”.

It is a meditative practice to be in the moment; to realize the past is locked and the future is fantasy, that the only reality is in this moment. It is the only thing you have control over, this moment and what you do with it.

So breathe, and check in with yourself. In this moment, am I OK?  In this moment, do I have a home, a job, food in the fridge? In this moment, are the people I love OK? If you have challenges in this moment, what can you do in this moment to deal with those? Try to let go of the need to look out weeks and months, and churn over what might be, what the worst could look like, and how life might be different. Do your best to make THIS moment good and peaceful, and when the moment comes that there is a challenge to deal with, your soul will be ready.

Right now, most of us are waiting in that line behind the blocks, scared at all that we have stirred up in our heads. It is not our turn to face the challenge. We can be in this moment of waiting without being scared, we can lean on each other, we can find ways to laugh.

In THIS moment, we can be OK.

Fondly,

Coach Jill

Ripples

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It’s an old metaphor, to throw a stone in a pond and watch the ripples spread and multiply, to remind us that the things we do have effects that we don’t realize or even intend. Sometimes, you are lucky enough to find out where a ripple goes. A conversation recently with a friend reminded me of one of my own; as usual, names have been changed, and quotes are somewhat paraphrased.

Coaching high school swimming was a mixed bag of frustration and reward. Grueling schedules, uncertain weather, convoluted rules, facility issues, kids not showing, flu season, low pay…the frustrations were many. The rewards felt fewer, but man! The rewards were huge when they came.

I was a great believer in a “no cuts” policy. This was a public school sport, and unlike other sports, swimming is a life skill, and a “save-your-life” skill as well. Over the years, we had many kids come to try the team who didn’t know how to swim at all, and just wanted a chance to learn. We took them all.

In my 2nd or 3rd season with the team, a young woman, a senior,  came to us during the first week of practice, and shared that she didn’t know how to swim but wanted to learn. Tiara was tall, thin and muscular, and looked like she had about 2% body fat, which is not really an ideal combination for an adult learning to swim. Fat floats, and learning to float is immeasurably important when learning to swim, so I knew we had our work cut out for us. It was a challenge, but she was determined, and so was I. We used aerobic float belts, kick boards, pull buoys…basically whatever it took to assist her with the float part so that she could learn the swim techniques that would eventually overcome her lack of flotation.

She was without a doubt our most dedicated attendee at practice, and worked hard. By January (our season began in November), we talked about her racing in a meet. She very nervously and somewhat reluctantly agreed, so we taught her to dive, and in a meet toward the end of that month, she raced a 50 freestyle for the very first time. It was one of my proudest moments as a coach, and I didn’t think I could be happier or more gratified with our work together.

I was wrong. You see, I hadn’t seen the ripple yet.

Fast forward a couple years to another meet, another group of kids. During a break in the action, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find a grinning Tiara at my side. We shared a big hug, and the talk naturally moved straight into “What are you doing these days?!”  She caught me up with what she had been up to, and then shared that since she left school, she had been teaching swim lessons to kids like her, teenagers who didn’t know how to swim. My recollection is that it was her appreciation of what we had done for her, what she had learned and overcome with the support of the swim team, that had inspired her to pay-it-forward.

I was floored. I thought that the reward from that stone I’d thrown in the pond was her personal accomplishment, but that was just the beginning. It was a stunning reminder that our actions have ripples, and that we don’t know the lives we end up touching without ever knowing.

This was a humbling moment. Fortunately in this case, the stone I threw created positive ripples, but the ripples of our actions can just as easily be harmful. It is a reminder to be careful and mindful in our interactions with others so that the ripples we make are positive, and that what others pay forward in our names are things we are proud to own. We may never know where the ripple lands, but if we throw our stones with care and love and concern for others, chances are the ripples will carry that as well.

The Space Between Breaths

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breathe-deeply-wooden-sign

I have this tshirt from my full time job that just says BREATHE on the front. My swimmers use to say that I wore that as a cruel joke because of how much I enjoyed giving breath control sets. Controlling breathing is crucial for the physical aspects of competitive swimming, but I’ve long maintained, somewhat secretly, that it is a psycho-spiritual discipline as well.

I’ve been a swimmer longer than I can comprehend. I turned 50 last week, so swimming, both the doing of it and the coaching of it, have taken up a majority of my time on this planet. To say I love it would be an understatement. Swimming itself is a spiritual experience for me, and I get very “zen” about the feel of the water, the sensations of movement through it, and the mindfulness of breathing that swimming requires. I have yet to find anything, any exercise or discipline, that is as truly mind-body-spirit as swimming.

Until today. I went to my first yoga class today, after resisting the urge to start for several years. I had let fear and many excuses block my path, but the time had finally come…I turned 50, the stars aligned and the universe kicked me in the butt and said, “NOW!” So I went.

It was tough, physically and mentally. But I fell in love with the breathing…it’s so much like my first love! The core of the practice is managing your breathing and being mindful of it, using it to aid the movement of your body. I kept thinking, “I can do this! I know it! I’ve taught it!”.

There is a moment when you are doing deep rhythmic breathing when you realize that you can inhale more than you thought you could. There is a moment when you realize there is no rush to exhale. There is a moment when you learn how to expel all the air, not just the “stuff on top” like we do all day, but ALL of it, pushing your diaphragm with intention up into your lungs to push out the last bit. This is all super cool, but the best moment, my favorite moment, is the space between breaths.

It takes a little time to get into the rhythm of those really profound breaths and intentional exhales, but once you adapt, you can find the space. What I’ve discovered is that once I expel all the air, there is a moment, sometimes a second or two, sometimes more, where I don’t feel the urge to breathe at all. There is no urgency, no stress, no worry, no physical pressure to begin the next inhale. It is a moment of absolute perfect awareness and tranquility, floating, yet being 100% present at the same time.

I’m not sure why I felt compelled to share this. Perhaps it is because I haven’t written in a long while. Perhaps it is because I’m in the throes of a new “crush” and wanted to babble about it. Perhaps it is because I enjoy how one part of my life connects and prepares me for another, allowing me to honor what has gone before and use it to inform my next steps.

Or maybe I just thought it was cool. Namaste!

The Right Fit

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goggles2

It’s amazing how much having things fit right affects performance. Swimmers spend a lot of time trying (and rejecting) brands and styles of suits, goggles, caps, fins, etc, in order to find the right fit. Once you find it, you pray the manufacturer doesn’t change anything before you can buy a lifetime supply of what “fits”. I’ve seen kids reduced to tears over the “good” goggles breaking, and I know my own workouts are impacted by a new suit that rubs in the wrong place.

Having equipment that is just the right fit might seem a trivial concern, but not having to think about something leaking or rubbing or falling off while you train or race is crucial. The wrong fit is, at the very least, a distraction and at worst, the cause of minor injuries. No athlete wants to have to waste time thinking about what their uniform and training gear are doing while they train….they just want to train, so a lot of non-training time is devoted to finding the equipment that is just the right fit.

If only we spent that kind of time and care making sure other aspects of our lives fit right! How much happier would we be if we dedicated the time to making sure our colleges, our jobs, our friends, our homes, our communities, our churches, our life partners, were truly the right fit, the BEST fit for us. In those really important and crucial parts of our lives, we allow ourselves to be swayed by the opinions of others or by the reputation of the institution, or by money, or by convenience, rather than choosing what fits us.

I have witnessed a lot of conversations between swimmers regarding goggles, why people use these or those, and I have yet to see anyone change what they use just because a friend uses something else. They might try them out, but it’s usually more in the vein of “Let me use your goggles for a minute and see how they fit”. When it comes to suits and equipment, fit is a choice they make and stick to with confidence.

Yet we are so easily swayed when it comes to our choices in important matters. Sometimes the wrong fit is just a distraction from being our best selves, sometimes the wrong fit can cause us injury of some kind, whether physical, emotional or mental. Forcing ourselves into situations that our gut is telling us is the wrong fit certainly will cause stress if nothing else.

My recent coaching experience was an example of a wrong fit in my own life. For various reasons, I ignored some signs and gut reactions that this was not the right place for me, and as a result, I wasn’t happy, and certainly was NOT my best coaching self. It has left me dissatisfied with the experience, but also a bit annoyed with myself for not honoring that inner voice. Despite all my years of experience with suits and goggles, I tried to force something to fit when it just wasn’t the right thing.

You would think I would have known better.

Connections

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HSSwimDay3 KR 13

I swam for 8 years in the Northern Virginia area. I swam for a summer league team with over 100 members, my high school team of over 40 kids, and a year round club team which had between 600 and 800 members, over 50 of which swam at my practice site on a regular basis. I have no friends from that experience. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Not even one peripheral acquaintance located on Facebook. Given the thousands of hours I spent in this pursuit, that is a sad and pitiful statistic.

Given my own experience, it has been an ongoing wonder for me to watch my swimmers interact and build friendships. I have to confess that there were times I simply didn’t understand when a kid changed teams (or refused to, despite bad coaching) because “that’s where their friends were”.  I have learned from them how much better the intensity of practice and the stress of meets can be when shared with people you care about. I have learned, mostly from my high school team, that the motivation for attending a 5:30am practice can be gleaned from the sharing of the misery. I have learned that while parents and coaches can say a lot, the most powerful words come from your friends. The swimmers I’ve coached have taught me what my own experience lacked.

That emotional connection, that love, is truly the glue that holds it all together, as well as the prize that makes it all worthwhile. Having folks in your corner, cheering for you and rooting for your success, offering a hug and a shoulder when things don’t go well…isn’t that what we all want? Whether it’s a dozen people, or just that one best friend, no one matters quite the way those friends do. They are the lift, the security blanket, the laughter, the tears, the scream of joy, the quiet understanding, the ones who are there solely because they want to be. They are the ones our eyes seek first, the ones who will understand best both our joy and our disappointment, the ones who do not judge or critique or point out where we went wrong. They are the ones who know when we are not feeling well, or having relationship issues, or family problems, or ate too much ice cream. They are the ones willing to go to bat for us and ask for help when we can’t ask for ourselves.

While I know that my attention and presence were important to my swimmers, they taught me how much more crucial that friend, that love connection, was to their growth and success. They have friends that are friends away from the pool, friends they will keep because they laughed and cried and understood and cheered and hugged and sang songs and offered a towel and sometimes just stood there next to them. I’m glad I got to see it, and share in its warmth.