It’s All In Your Perspective

As far as I can tell, the purpose competitive swimming plays in my life (bear with me here, it has one) is to make me realize that travel soccer could be a lot worse!

My best girlfriend has two daughters who swim like my kids play soccer.  Which is to say, constantly, everlastingly, and generally not close to home.  Both of us spend hours a day in the car driving somebody to and from practice.  However, as much as I bellyache about soccer, I’d pick it over swimming in a hot second.

For starters, each sport has a month of the year that is generally pretty slow.  Yes. A single month.  Ugh.  For swimming, that’s August.  Soccer is December.  Can you even imagine how much of a nutjob I would be if I had to spend December at soccer fields somewhere instead of getting my Christmas stuff done??  My girlfriend spent the entirety of a three day weekend (Dec 15-17!) across the state at a swim meet with her older daughter and finally found time to put her tree up on the 23rd.  That same daughter has training out of state starting tomorrow and running through New Year’s.

A downside of soccer is that it pretty much kills the end of summer (tryouts and training are intense in July/August.  That said, the school soccer season is over by Halloween—two months of the season are over the summer when you aren’t trying to deal with school as well.  School swimming is a winter sport and tryouts are November for a Nov-March season.  Loads of fun when you are juggling in end-of-semester testing with school and club swimming practices.

Oh, and last but not least: you can pretty much rely on a soccer game taking a specified period of time, after which you can go home.  Exact duration depends on the age of the kid and the league, but generally speaking, within 90 minutes you’re done.  None of this meet that lasts all weekend and your kid swims a grand total of fifteen minutes in three days but you still have to be there all three days stuff.  Yikes.

Somebody once said that if you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.  I’ve been warned and hell will freeze over before my kids become swimmers!