Quote:
Originally Posted by thealmighty
At what point will the kids begin to specialize in one or two strokes, or are they all just that good at all four? At the high school I teach and coach at, hardly any of the swimmers, even freshman at 14 years old, swim all strokes in meets (I coached swimming for two years, but not because I knew how. Just was no one else to do it at the time).
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For the most part the Gold team doesn't want kids to declare themselves as a swimmer for just a specific stroke. There are few reasons for this...first, they feel that it limits what kids can accomplish. Second, if a kid only swims a specific stroke then they have very few events at year round meets to compete in. Finally, and most importantly, with many of these kids still growing into and sometimes completely through high school, their best strokes often change (as we've seen on a small scale with my kids - Bailey losing her Breaststroke and Bear losing but then regaining his fly), plus an injury for a specialized swimmer can pretty much end their ability to compete. This happens most frequently with Breaststrokers that end up having knee problems.
Now, one important thing to note is the difference from year-round verses high school swimming. Year round meets are multiple days, lasting 8 to 12 hours total, thus allowing kids to swim numerous events a day. Whereas high school is pretty much competed on one evening or Saturday morning. Because the high school meets are much shorter, the coaches will put the swimmers only in the events they do the best in. In fact, I'm not sure with high school meets if there is a limit to the number of events kids can swim (I'm assuming there is), thus the year rounders will be specialists in high school.
In fact, next year will be interesting for us as Brett will start high school, and I'd suspect he'll want to swim on the high school team...where initially he may only compete as a breaststroker, until he gets to be bigger and older, then they will probably give him additional events to swim at that point.
Does this answer your question?