Thomas recently finished his first season of machine-pitch baseball. He improved throughout the season just like he did in each of his one seasons played in t-ball and coach pitch, but I don’t know if he’ll want to play again (granted, he said that after coach pitch and yet he changed his mind). Baseball, soccer…they are not sports that seem to come naturally to him and while he sticks them out, I don’t know that I’d say he enjoys it.
So in the quest to find the sport that Thomas might actually enjoy, I signed him up for swim team this year. I was worried it was going to be too much of a time commitment, and if he hated it, it would be an absolute power struggle making it to practice five days a week. But I also knew there was a chance he would love it. And he does.
On days we had baseball games and swim practice, I begged him to skip swimming and just focus on baseball, but he wanted to swim. He has improved his freestyle stroke (and is still working on getting better!), learned a proper backstroke and been introduced to the breaststroke and butterfly. Strangely enough, he has really picked up on the butterfly more quickly than others on the team. I am completely confused by the stroke, so I’ve been pleasantly surprised and impressed.
Next week they start their official “meets.” There will be eight of them – though the first is a “mock meet” that will serve the purpose of being an official time trial to see which kids will race in the meet. Not all children will swim for points at each meet, but each child is guaranteed to swim competitively at least twice. Thomas is hoping he gets to swim (for points) more than twice, so he is working hard at being the fastest.
They had practice trials at practice yesterday (they were also learning how to dive off the blocks at the same time). This was the third time Thomas did it and I videoed it because I realized the first two times he was finishing long before the other children who jumped in at the same time. In this video, I missed the part where he dove off the block and he didn’t finish as quickly as the other times, but he still was first. He is the swimmer in the third lane from the top.
Before swim practice yesterday, he had a private lesson with his swim coach to work on his freestyle technique. I didn’t make this video until the end of the lesson, so at this point he had been swimming for nearly 30 minutes and was understandably tired. Even so, you can see how he is doing (though he was doing a better job of not “slapping” the water a bit earlier in the lesson).
The pool lap is 25 meters. Thomas is doing well, and he continuously improves. Best of all, he loves it. I’m excited to see if he still feels that way when we start meets next week…and hour-long practices 5 days a week (will replace the 30 minutes we’ve been doing since the first of May).
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