Lifeguard Cert

I realize that, north of the Equator at least, I’m a little off-season with a blog about lifeguard certification. Most people get certified in the spring before the high-demand outdoor summer season begins. But we recently made Little Miss Coach get certified, so it’s still fresh in my mind.

The critical verb there is “made” because, while I know my daughter appreciates the opportunity to earn money for herself, the reality is Mr. Coach and I have been waiting for the day when we could have our own personal lifeguard. We’re not the first parents in our university community to do this. There are others who’ve gotten their kids certified for the express purpose of having a backup lifeguard for those days when the assigned lifeguard doesn’t show up. At a small pool with a small community of daily swimmers, it happens. But there’s nothing like being able to say, “Oh, I’ll just call Herbert and get him over here. He’s only sleeping.” And then, about 15 minutes later, you get in to swim while surly Herbert sits and watches and prays that his dad goes under just so he can not rescue him.

And now we can do the same thing to Little Miss Coach! For her certification, she got tag-team taught by her father and his assistant coach who are both Red Cross certified lifeguard instructors. Boy, was she psyched!

And she should be. Mr. Coach is very highly regarded in local lifeguard-certification circles, and most especially for his victim skills. As part of the certification process, the would-be lifeguards have to jump in and rescue drowning victims. Mr. Coach has two specialties: One is the Victim Who Doesn’t Float and the other is the Victim Who Fights Back.

Both “victimizations” are brilliant, but other instructors don’t like to bring Mr. Coach in for just any group of would-be lifeguards. That would be like using a howitzer to go bird shooting. No, rather, they tend to hold him in reserve for their big strapping college guys (and a few gals) who are going for the open-water lifeguarding jobs where they’re more likely to encounter difficult victims.

Your municipal and country-club pool guards might encounter a modified version of either the dead-weight victim who goes right to the bottom or the spastic-meltdown victim who could break your nose in a panic. But for the most part, they’re only going to be dealing with unsupervised 5-year-olds in the deep end.

In the open-water situations, that’s where a guard could go down with the victim if he or she can’t maintain control of the situation. So if a guard can get past Mr. Coach, you can rest assured they can wrangle in a drunken 27-year-old who can’t swim but decided to wade out over his head to retrieve a Frisbee.

But, for lack of any other victims this time, Mr. Coach was deployed on his own daughter. He decided to go with the Victim Who Doesn’t Float which I thought was an audacious choice, given that Little Miss Coach barely cracks 100 pounds on the scale. However I can understand the logic: Her skull is just as titanium-hard as his and the two of them have given each other black eyes before with accidental head butts. A Victim Who Fights Back would just be asking for another black eye.

So she brought in her dead-weight father without mishap, earned her lifeguard card, and now will be at our lap-swim beck and call. Who said parenthood was all give and no take? Certainly not us!

Movin' On

Most people probably assume that a coach would rather die than see a single athlete give up the sport that he or she coaches. Not true. There’s a natural lifespan to most athletic careers. Of course some have a very long lifespan. Take U.S. swimmer Yoshi Oyakawa, the 1952 Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter backstroke. Just this past March, after aging up to the 75-79 age group, he swam the 50-yard backstroke in 33.37 seconds. If I didn’t have such good self esteem, hearing that would make me want to quit swimming and take up golf. He’s unbelievable.

A more normal competitive lifespan sees athletes through age-group, then high school and maybe even college and beyond with the competitions. But not always. Sometimes the lifespan is shorter, but you always hope that the primary reason someone decides to move on from a particular sport is because they found something else that excited them more in life. Take our daughter, for example. Blessed with equal dollops of talent for swimming and ballet, we knew she’d eventually have to make a choice as to which one she’d pursue. Little Miss Coach was a very good backstroker as a youngster. After one particularly good meet, when she sliced her way down a 50-meter pool into the 10-and-under national rankings that year, I said to her, “Holy cow, honey, what did you do different this time that it looked so fast?” She grinned and said, “I did it to the Radetzky March.”


That’s when we realized her days in swimming were numbered. (Even better was when I told one of her ballet teachers about her humming Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March to herself during that race, and he replied, “Well, yes, of course. She was harnessing her creative energy to resolve the challenge she had been presented with.” Seriously, that is exactly what he said. When she complains now about some of the fluffernutters teaching and directing her, I just hum the Radetzky March.)

Sometimes college athletes take a break, maybe for studies abroad or to act in a university play. Sometimes they return to swimming, but often they simply move on. Fortunately, though, they move on with happy memories of their time in the sport. And they probably still get in the pool every now and then.

What you don’t want to see are the kids who give it up because they burned out and now hate the sport. Usually when you encounter athletes like that, there’s a rabid adult right behind them – either a parent or a coach -- who made them feel like a failure for not achieving specific goals. And it’s not just limited to swimming either. We’ve seen this kind of self-loathing, adult-induced burnout in all kinds of sports, ballet and music. You want to take all the fun and future out of an activity for kids? Saddle them with adults’ ambitions on their way to those finish lines or curtain calls.

But if you want them to enjoy the journey, then step back and be amazed as they move on.

The Mother Mystique

The role of the mother in sports-related genetics has gotten increasing amounts of attention from scientists in recent years.

Yes, obviously all athletes have mothers. And yes, the word is out that a lot of coaches look at the mothers if they want to know what kind of body an athlete might have when he or she has finished growing. That’s because scientific research has proven that all kinds of physical traits get passed on primarily through the mothers’ chromosomes. Let’s call it the “Mother Mystique.”

Specifically it’s something like the mom’s mitochondria determining how much bang for the buck a person gets when they exercise, but I’m a little fuzzy on the details because the last time I heard this lecture was during labor when Mr. Coach got to chatting with the nurses.

Note to other women: Do NOT bring a professor of exercise physiology into the delivery room. They’ll be all like, “Well, honey, the physiological reason you’re feeling pain in that region of your body right now is because your discombobular artery is pressing on your parapsychopelvic nerve but maybe if you try a little more biosystematic oxygenation....” At which point the wife of the professor of exercise physiology tells him to do something NC-17 with HIS parapsychodiscombobular whatever.

But there was also something in there about why Mr. Coach was sure the newest Coach family member (then in transit) would resemble his mother in the body department – i.e., longer, leaner, more sarcastic. And so far, he’s been right.

Little Mr. Coach is pretty much a carbon copy of his mother (but with a much bigger Pokemon card collection). Little Miss Coach is more of a mix of both parents’ bodies but does seem to be lengthening out like me, the older she gets. She also has transitioned from swimming into ballet, and I can tell you those people are even more fixated on the Mother Mystique than swim coaches are.

But a lot of mothers of prospective college recruits (and ballerinas) freak out, thinking their children will be penalized because Mom doesn’t fit her high-school jeans anymore. They shouldn’t. That’s because no matter what the effects of time or Twinkies, your underlying bone structure and body type will be readily apparent to any halfway decent coach. If you want to go on a diet or start exercising more, do it for you. Don’t do it for some dumb college coach.

In the meantime, if you’ve got a kid with a modicum of talent in any physical endeavor, do what any loving mother should do – never let the father forget who the kid gets it from.

Earning the Perks

Hopefully other coach families out there won’t mind if I dish on one of my favorite coach-family perks – having the keys to the pool. It’s not exactly a secret but it’s not exactly something that non-coach families love to hear about. Understandably so. When other families live at the mercy of the pool-scheduling gods, they don’t want to hear about me working out in lanes 3, 4, 5 and 6 if I feel like it.

But you know what? It makes up for a lot. Let me just give you one example of why having the keys to the pool is a perk you should never begrudge a coach family. That example would be my most recent New Year holiday.

This year, the Little Coaches and I didn’t travel down to Florida with the team. So, on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we bid Mr. Coach and his sun-hungry swimmers a cheery adieu as the bus headed out. Three hours later, I was reading in the living room when Little Miss Coach went sprinting past me to the bathroom. The sound of vomiting ensued.

"This better not be bulimia," I muttered as I headed up the stairs. Thankfully it was just a nasty 24-hour stomach flu that took another 24 hours to recover from. Little Miss Coach recovered and then, a day later, I came down with it. (Spectacularly, I might add.) Here’s where it gets a little poignant.

You see, most collegiate and many large-club coach families don’t live near family. That’s just the nature of the job: You go to where there is a job. And though the people in your community very often become your family, you still have to be very self-sufficient. The Coach Family has relied on the kindness of some amazing friends when kids have been born, new houses have been moved into, or the family patriarch ends up in the ER because his bike is a magnet for idiot truck drivers. But stuff that involves a toilet? Sorry – but that’s immediate-family territory.

So the Little Coaches and I hunkered down and got through it. As I was recovering, though, I found myself thinking, "Dang, that molar hurts." About 12 hours later, when I couldn’t see straight on account of the shooting pains in my head, I called my dentist – whom I found on a day cruise off the coast of South Carolina. The long-distance diagnosis was that a root canal was needed. But it couldn’t be done until the following Monday, three days later.

So I got through it all and I recovered with such admirable speed that by the time Mr. Coach returned home, he was able to insist that I didn’t look at all like I had lost and regained five pounds (the hard way) since he last saw me.

Yes, this year finally trumps the year that I spent six days snowed in with a 5-year-old, a 6-month-old and half a bottle of cooking sherry while Mr. Coach was, again, in that lovely land called Florida.

So do you get it now? Hearing that the Coach Family makes selfish use of the keys to the pool might make you seethe with jealousy, but we’ve earned it.

Oh yes, we have earned it.

When Dad's a Coach

People sometimes ask me how my children are affected by having a swim coach for a parent.

Well, for starters, I say, they don’t know any better so let’s not get them thinking they’ve been affected, OK?

Don’t all children have a revolving cast of 27 babysitters, each of whom is a Red Cross-certified lifeguard?

Don’t all children go to their first fraternity party at the age of six months and get used as "chick magnets"?

Don’t all children become the subject of semester-long Abnormal Psychology studies or have big toys called Vasa Trainers?

And don’t all children have more pictures of themselves with college swimmers than with their grandparents in the family photo album?

Of course not, but my children don’t need to know that.

The one effect most people assume is that my children started swimming early and often. Not a chance. First of all, neither Mr. Coach nor I had the cojones to drop our infants into the pool the way you see all those hard-core swimming parents doing. For one thing, that’s just...scary. For another thing, have you ever tried to coach an infant? You think freshmen are bad, try getting an 8-month-old to breathe on both sides.

No, the Coach Offspring started swimming when they were good and ready. Little Miss Coach started swimming when she was 5 and accompanied her father to a weekend-long outdoor meet with a kiddie pool on the side. By the end of the weekend, she had decided she wanted to swim, so she did. Little Mr. Coach started when he was 4 and wanted to keep up with his big sister. He spent a lot more time on the bottom of the pool than he did above water (still does), but he was having fun and getting air when he needed it, so it was all good.

Both children, however, started spending time on the pool deck long before they swam. For one thing, it was a good way to see their father. That January-to-March time period is a critical juncture in any swim-coach family’s life (I like to call it the "Single Parenthood Season"), so if the children were going to remain on a first-name basis with their father, they had to go to him at the pool.

One benefit of this arrangement is that each child started speaking in sentences rather early. One of Little Miss Coach’s first sentences was "Stwee lie aah kikov duh wah" (translation: "Streamline and kick off the wall"). One of Little Mr. Coach’s was "Stay in there!" (no translation necessary).

And these early attempts at communication provided us with valuable clues about our children’s personalities. Little Miss Coach is the more constructively instructive type, whereas Little Mr. Coach is...not. He’s a little more tell-it-like-it-is and don’t-even-think-about-sugar-coating-it.

When he was five years old, we met a young woman who had been a bronze medal Olympic swimmer. On the ride home later, my daughter said to her brother, "A bronze medal in the Olympics! Do you know what that means?" Little Mr. Coach looked at his sister and said, "Yeah. It means she didn’t win."

Hopefully that’s one effect that can be undone.

FOO: Friends of Officials

One of the risks of being a swimmer in a swim-coach family is that your coaching parent is friends with the officials. Now most people might say, "Oh, but that’s great! Officials are the most powerful people at a swim meet! Knowing the officials must be a definite plus!"

You would think. But I vividly remember the first time my son, Little Mr. Coach, swam a 100-yard Individual Medley. Now, mind you, Little Mr. Coach was only six years old at the time so Mr. Coach’s and my expectations were not high. But he and all his 8 & Under buddies had decided they wanted to try 100 IMs. (If you have to ask why, you’ve obviously never had an 8 & Under Boy in your household. When they’re not daring each other to try 100 IMs, they’re either perfecting their armpit-farting technique or licking electric sockets. Sending them out to screw up a 100 IM is a fairly safe and socially acceptable use of their energies.)

So anyway, Little Mr. Coach swam his first 100 IM and you didn’t have to be a meet official to know his result that day wouldn’t count. But you did have to be a meet official to disqualify him. Five times. At least that’s what the jolly official who came over to Mr. Coach afterwards said.
"Yeah," the jolly official said to Mr. Coach between guffaws, "we deked him five times, but we would have deked him anyway just for being your kid."

That’s a choice example of what folks in the officiating biz call "Official Humor."

Little Miss Coach and Little Mr. Coach have also learned they can count on meet officials to remind them of their parentage. Officials will look at a heat sheet and notice the last name.

"Hey, you’re not Mr. Coach’s kid, are you?" they’ll say, pretending to be all menacing about it. In situations like these, Mr. Coach and I have advised our children to deploy the gays-in-the-military strategy: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

But, to be fair, there are some advantages to name recognition. A coach’s kid is rarely going to get lost in the crowd and end up in the wrong lane or heat. And the officials figured out pretty quickly that if Little Miss Coach got DQ’d for something, it was kinder to discreetly tell her dad and let him handle the soul-rending swell of tears from those big brown eyes. Officials aren’t made of stone, you know.

But Little Mr. Coach is proving to be payback for Official Humor because to officiate a race that he’s in means you better know your rule book inside and out.

Walking during a backstroke? That’s disqualifiable.

Coming to a complete stop in the water because he couldn’t remember if he was swimming a 50 or a 100? Not disqualifiable because he didn’t touch bottom and he kept facing forward before starting up again.

Hopping onto the blocks after a heat has started and diving in (and even finishing first) when he was slated for the next heat? Actually, he got them on that one. The official deked Little Mr. Coach for "delay of meet" but Mr. Coach didn’t protest. He’s sure it wasn’t a "delay of meet" offense but he has no idea what exactly it was.

Hey, friends know when to cut friends some slack.