Swimming, In the beginning
I didn’t grow up with competitive swimming. I never swam laps until eighth grade, when I was allowed to practice with the swim team in their off season, during the football and basketball offseason.
My mother worked at the Jr High as did the swim coach. I think my mother said something along the lines that she thought I would be a decent swimmer and that I might enjoy swimming and the swim coach suggested I might want to come see what it was like during the off season. I was agreeable since it would get me out of doing laps around the school all morning in athletics, so I showed up one morning to swim practice. I had never swam laps before, and when I showed up, the pool looked 100 yards long. I had been playing football not 4 months earlier, so I should have known better.
I introduced myself to the coach, who happened to be my gym coach from middle school, and she introduced me to a tall skinny girl who was standing there during my introduction. I remember this, because I looked her over and she asked me, bluntly, why I looked her over. I don’t know if I was embarassed and looking down at my feet after our introductions or I was checking out the attire of my new aquaintance who happened to be half naked. It was six in the morning, I was walking around in a speedo with a group of high schoolers, all older than me, all of whom had swam together for at least the entire school year. It was not a good start to the morning. Not bad either, but quite uncomfortable.
Now lucky for me, swimming under this particular coach was very laid back to start with, and it being the off season, even moreso. I probably did some dry lands with the team, which was no big deal because basketball season had left me in good shape. We did eventually get into the water and I remember one set of 100s that we were supposed to do after warmup. Probably 10×100s on interval. If I remember correctly, I swam down to the other end and stopped. Remember I thought the pool was 100 yards? No one else stopped, and I thought about it some more, the pool must be 50 yards long. That made more sense. So I think I finished a few 50s and then I asked what exactly was I supposed to be doing. 4 lengths was a 100. Oops. Thats ok, I think I was just making the 50s on interval.
Swimming got much better from there. For whatever reason, the new guy is treated really well. So everyone was nice to me, and went out of their way to explain what was going on. I had passed all the red cross swim lessons when I was a kid, so I could do free, back and breast and I knew what fly was, just not how to do it. I made it through the practices and probably was able to keep up with the workouts after a while. All of that was unimportant.
It was unimportant because Friday, off season, was water polo day. And not organized water polo, but animal ball water polo. Let the fun begin. I never had so much fun playing a game and have since never enjoyed playing water polo as much has I did those few weeks playing in off season swimming at the end of 8th grade. I think that had as much to do with my decision to join the swim team as anything.
Grapevine High School didn’t have a pool at the time, so they swam at the local community college’s pool. For whatever reason, the high school team didn’t swim quite to the end of the year, so they had a study hall for the last few weeks of school. I, on the other hand, had to return to athletics, which was a shock to the system. It was obvious to me that I fit in with the swimmers better than anyone in athletics. It was good that the sports were broken up starting as a freshman.