My earliest memories consist of me learning to swim. I started taking swim lessons as soon as I learned to walk. Once I turned six, my mom made the decision to sign me up for the club swim team, due to the fact that I had repeated the highest swim lesson level over four times.
While I was on the club team, I learned everything I know about the sport of swimming, and more importantly, I learned how to be a competitor. It was expected of everybody on the team to win our races. The only issue with that mentality was we had to view our teammates as competition. We had to learn to view the ones who we joked around with during tough sprint sets at practice were our biggest competition. Any indication of “teammate” was forgotten once we hopped onto the starting block.
When I joined my high school’s team, I went in with an overly competitive mindset that had been instilled in me for the eight years prior. During my first practice, I can remember scoping out who was going to be my biggest competition on the team and what I was going to have to do to beat them. This mentality quickly began to change for the better.
Two weeks later was our first pasta dinner before our meet. My mom drove me and upon dropping me off, I told her to pick me up in an hour because it was probably going to be boring. Once I got there, I quickly ran over to the other freshmen on the team; we were too intimidated to talk to anybody else on the team, as they were mostly all upperclassmen boys. We got our food and sat down at a table with ten of our teammates. At first we sat there awkwardly talking to ourselves, but before we knew it, we were talking to everybody at the table; the foreign exchange student was teaching us Danish and we made fun of my friend for spilling an entire bottle of soda on the rug. When dinner was over, I was about to call my mom for a ride home, but then everybody went down to the basement.
Thinking we would all leave once dinner was over, I was utterly confused as to why everybody was going down to the basement, but I decided to follow everyone anyways. People started to play board games and video games, or just hung out on the couch. My friends and I decided to play “Apples to Apples.” The hour I originally planned on staying turned into five; before this, I had never felt like I was actually part of a swim team.
The next four years were no different than that first pasta dinner. No matter what, we were always a team, whether it meant giving someone a pep talk before their race, coming up with excuses to the coaches as to why someone didn’t show up to practice, or working together to convince our coaches to stop at McDonald’s on the bus ride home from away meets. No matter what, we were there for each other. Never before would I have thought that a decision as simple as playing Apples to Apples at a pasta dinner would completely change my perspective on the sport I devoted my entire life to. I learned that swimming is the farthest thing from an individualized sport. It is about supporting your teammates when no one else does, and the word teammate becomes synonymous with family. I learned that you don’t swim against your teammates, you swim for them.