By Robert Sullivan, third in a series
They swim for rewards, certainly.
We are all reward-aspirant to larger and lesser degrees. Young athletes in our neck of the Westchester, New York, woods are encouraged to be so with the early-years participation trophies of Little League and AYSO, now stored haphazardly in boxes in the cellar. The swimmers pile up medals and ribbons—so many ribbons—and also the occasional plaque.
It’s a measure of how much swimming means to some of these kids that if you chance to visit their bedrooms, you notice that some of the plaques still hang, long after the film-star and sports-star posters have been thrown out. What do these plaques in fact mean in their resilience on the wall? Nostalgia?
Maybe not entirely. A plaque, handed over at a ceremony, represented a different level of achievement than a medal, ribbon or participation trophy. It usually commemorated something specific, and if the heading-for-college kid still feels good about that bygone moment, about that instant of touching the wall after a race particularly well swum or about dedicating five or even ten years to a particular team, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. The plaque is a memento, yes, but also a memory.
So these local swimmers arrive at Greeley as freshmen, and then there’s the first meeting of the swim team. They’re filled with expectation but, even more, anxiety. What will be the outcome? What will be the high school rewards? There have been plenty of pre-teen years spent amassing the ribbons. What now?
The first reward becomes evident pretty quickly. The kids improve at swimming. They grow as athletes, becoming fitter, either because of the program or because, inspired to contribute more to the team, they go the extra mile in their extra time. They train. They’re old enough now to realize that being in shape feels good.
Then Greeley starts to win, and keeps winning. It is true that all team-sports experiences can benefit the kids no matter the W-L ledger, but it’s also true that winning brings the positive experience more readily to hand. The Greeley girls and boys swimmers have, as noted in an earlier piece, enjoyed a fine success rate in recent years—emphasis on the word “enjoyed.”
The kids don’t want the season to end; this is a truly fun time with a fine group of friends. This makes them try even harder in the pool, because in fact there’s a way to extend the experience. As Tom Brady knows, there’s the season, and then there’s the post-season. We’ll speak of this a bit longer in the next piece in this series.
This year’s Greeley team, once past the Scarsdale showdown, has progressed to another strong “regular” season, which will be concluded this coming week with a dual meet against rival Fox Lane. Then, in the next few weeks for many of our swimmers, it’s on to the Conference championship—aka “the Divisionals—then, for qualifiers, Sectionals and States. Even those on the team who haven’t made the cut to actually swim will attend and cheer on their mates.
“The post-season” and extensions like it go by other names in the sports pages: “crunch time” or “extra innings” or “overtime” or “bonus time.” That last one might be the best. This isn’t a reward like the wood-and-plastic trophies moldering downstairs. It’s better even than a plaque. It’s a bonus reward of one more day with buddies on a championship team: a little more time before this has to end, before graduation and life intervene.
Memories are the best rewards. More on this next time.
Bob Sullivan, a former editor and writer at Sports Illustrated, is more proudly a swim dad. His elder daughter and his son have competed in recent years for the Mount Kisco Boys & Girls Club Marlins and the Horace Greeley High School Quakers, both in New York. Sullivan recently wrote a series of articles for the Greeley boosters website speculating on why his kids and all the others stick with it, and they will be reprinted here in SwimSwam by permission of the author.