Nobody Ever Joined Swim Team For the Scenery

One of those things dads never talk about when they force you to join the swim team at a young, tender age, is that you will be bored out of your skull going back and forth in the pool. Don't go in thinking you'll see something interesting. You won't. There's nothing to look at in the pool, or even around the pool. It's even worse if the coach hates kids, like ours did. But I went, because my dad made me, and listening to rock 'n' roll in the car between news on the hour and half hour made the whole experience not as awful.

One day, having had enough of the coach who hated kids, I came up behind him after practice and shoved him into the pool. In he went, fully dressed in his street clothes, which everyone thought was funny, except for the coach, who didn't. I ran, of course, in spite of the "no running, no horseplay" sign. Up the stairs and into the locker room. Coach scrambled out of the pool and chased after me, though I was young, small, and quick. I ran to the left. He ran to the left. I ran to the right. He ran to the right. I could feel his hot lone wolf's breath on my neck as I tried to avoid him, but then he cornered me after the most elaborate zigzag maneuver I'd learned back when swimming was fun, in Guppies.

He picked me up, kicking, swinging, and screaming (I was, not him), and dragged me down the hall and down the stairs and out to the pool. He threw me way out into the middle of the pool, where not even the US Navy could rescue me. But they didn't have to, because I knew how to swim.

I reached the ladder, climbed out of the pool, and I walked slowly to the locker room and got dressed. When my dad picked me up and asked "how was swimming?" I said "horrible," but by then he'd already unplugged his hearing aid so he didn’t have to listen to my rock 'n' roll in the car.

I don't know what happened to Coach. Next time at practice he growled a lot more nicely, but the next time after that he was gone. Quit, fired, who knows? When you're a kid, you learn not to ask questions, you just come to accept that people come and go, and hopefully the next coach doesn't hate kids. Maybe he got drafted and shipped off to Vietnam to force those kids to swim laps against their will.

My dad, several years and swim teams later, let me give up swim team, because my mom said I could, and that was the end of discipline for me, other than a couple of years of cross country and track that nobody forced me to do. I also managed freshman and two years of sophomore in college before dropping out, though I did (after two and a half years crashing on people’s couches and floors on the pointless road of the western US and British Columbia) drop back in and graduate eight years after starting, having accumulated two Bachelor's degrees and three colleges. I did it with Honors, because by then I was older and wiser.

In spite of post-YMCA trauma, I still love the smell of chlorine in a swimming pool. It smells like victory.