First swim meet

Thomas had his first swim meet yesterday.  He was pretty nervous!  He was chosen to be one of the four boys in the 7-8 division on his team who were swimming "for points" in the 25M freestyle.  He was competing against boys who were 8 years old and he's only been 7 for not quite two months...so I think he did great!

It was an away meet, and while he is used to diving off the "blocks," they had to dive off the side at this pool.  He still needs some work on that.  You can see while the other boys were hanging out and relaxing before the start, Thomas is the one who practicing his dive form.  I was trying to tell him to relax but he was in his zone!

My video missed the moment of the dive, but he is the swimmer in the fourth lane from the top.  He swam really strong and I think he had his personal best time!

There was a little mix-up in his ribbon at first, so I didn't get a picture with him and the right ribbon until we were dressed to leave, but here's our happy guy, beaming with his 4th place ribbon!

 

He had a great time, and he told me when we were leaving that he already knows he wants to do swim team next year and the year after that!  Coming from Thomas, our non-sports-oriented child who seems to quickly tire of practice and games, this says a lot.  We are in hour-a-day practices now (five-six days a week), so it's a good thing he loves it!

Little fish

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.

Thomas at swim practice

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).

Swim lap at the end of swim 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).