Between the under-eight league trophies and the first travel team tryout, parents begin to question whether any of this is truly effective. The timetables get longer. Weekend competitions proliferate the children, who were once happy and defiant, begin to appear exhausted in a way that no 8 years old should. Families have also started to move sideways in silence, almost without anyone noticing. A large number of them have moved in the direction of the pool.
Of all things, swimming is a moment. The slower, less visually appealing kind, not the one with medals and televised relays. Goggles and a thermos of coffee are now being brought to municipal pools by parents who used to spend every Saturday loading cleats and shin guards into minivans. There seems to be a shift in the way families view youth sports, both practically and theoretically. Despite all of its claims, the competitive treadmill hasn’t produced the kind of childhood that many parents believed they were purchasing.
Since reading a recent interview with Terry Laughlin, the late founder of Total Immersion Swimming, who spent nearly fifty years swimming and thirty years coaching competitive swimmers, I’ve been thinking about this. He hesitated when asked if he would suggest a youth swim team to a parent today. He couldn’t quite say yes despite spending his entire life in the sport and, by his own admission, loving it more than ever. That reluctance speaks louder than one coach’s opinion, especially coming from a man whose career was built on the water.
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Topic | Shift from competitive sports to swimming for children |
| Primary Source | Terry Laughlin, founder of Total Immersion Swimming |
| Coaching Experience | ~30 years coaching competitive swimming |
| Years as Competitor | Nearly 50 years (started as a youth) |
| Key Concern | Burnout and injury among young competitive swimmers |
| Recommended Approach | Skill-first, joy-first, lifelong learning |
| Reference | USA Swimming – Learn to Swim |
Competition itself is not the issue. Competition can be fantastic, enlightening, and even molding. A growing number of coaches, parents, and former athletes claim that the issue is that youth sports have adopted the worst practices of professional athletics. With laps timed, splits charted, and weekends devoted to competitions, kids are now treated like miniature pros. Children in these programs are increasingly treated like elite athletes, with performance valued above nearly everything, according to a 2019 report on youth competitive swimming. Seeing where that ends is not difficult. According to Laughlin, the majority of young competitive swimmers burn out or sustain injuries before they realize the true joy of swimming.
The contrast is striking when you walk into any public pool on a weekday evening. There are no electronic touchpads, no whistles, and no parents using stopwatches to pace the deck. Children gaze at the ceiling lights while floating on their backs. While grandparents engage in water aerobics, teenagers swim sloppy, slow laps. In a sense, it resembles recreation, which was once the main goal. Somewhere along the way, swimming for fun or fitness was reframed as something that only “non-serious” kids did, and leisure became a means rather than an end.
Swimming as a non-competitive activity has been gaining popularity for years, but it accelerated during and after the pandemic when team sports were discontinued and families realized that a backyard pool or a YMCA lap session could keep them occupied for the entire summer. Some parents never returned. They saw their kids rediscover the joy of moving their bodies in front of no spectators or scoreboard, something that travel soccer had subtly taken away from them. It’s difficult to ignore how uncommon that has become.
What swimming actually teaches is another issue. As Laughlin noted, it is the only sport that can also be used to save lives. For the rest of their lives, a child who learns to swim well can be trusted in water environments, such as lakes, hotel pools, boats, and areas close to the ocean. No soccer league can claim that kind of return on investment. Additionally, swimming requires patience and problem-solving skills that few other sports do because it is so unnatural to the human body we are not aquatic by evolution. Youngsters who persevere typically gain more than just physical fitness. They leave with a sort of subdued competence.
Naturally, not everyone believes that competitive swimming is the bad guy in this situation. Many former club swimmers developed a love for the sport as children, continued to swim throughout college, and now carefully mentor the next generation. Good programs exist and have always existed. Whether parents are prepared to put in the effort to find a coach who teaches before timing, corrects before pushing, and treats a nine-year-old like a nine-year-old is the question. There are coaches like that. Simply put, they are more difficult to locate than they ought to be.
It is easy to interpret this gradual shift as a rejection of competition. Most likely it isn’t. It appears to be more of a recalibration a realization that childhood is fleeting, bodies are brittle, and the things we truly love are typically the ones that endure. It’s still unclear if the pool will ultimately prevail over the level playing field. For now, though, the children are grinning, the lane lines are packed, and the parents appear to be breathing for the first time in a long time.
i) https://instaswimusa.com/from-lessons-to-competitive-swimming/
ii) https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-seeing-young-sportspeople-as-athletes-first-children-second-222783
iii) https://goldfishswimschool.com/blog/so-youre-thinking-about-getting-your-kid-into-competitive-sports/
iv) https://www.goldclassswimming.com/changing-game-youth-sports/