How to Survive a High School Dual Meet

A high school swim meet is not like any other meets you—club swimmer—have probably been to before. It is not like the three day long Junior Olympics championship spanning from 6:45 A.M. till 7:14 P.M. each day, not like the five and a half day long travel meet down to Fresno in the burning a hundred and six degree atmosphere, and definitely not like the two day long CBA+ meet going for six hours per day with hundreds of swimmers—ranging from ages six to eighteen—swarming the little pool deck, sporting their clubs’ apparel.

High school dual meets are nothing like the lengthy club swim meets.

In any dual meet, the performance of the athletes is arbitrary unlike expecting record-breaking times at an end of the season shave ‘n taper meet. Diving into the meet unaware of what to expect is typical since there are multiple factors that could lead to a crappy swim after a long day endeavoring at school. Juniors trudging through the halls on five hours of sleep, or the diligent physic students hopping around campus for a velocity lab. Your body becomes lethargic after spending six hours in class listening to monotone lectures, methodically scribbling notes on outlines, and standing around lab benches trying to find the solubility of Pb2+. Once you step foot on the concrete deck, the dual meet becomes another event that you need to get through before reaching home.

Many times freshmen or new swimmers will question why their times in their events are not as slick as the many club meets they swam at previously. They question their credibility as a swimmer, who constantly boasts about his or her laser speed swimming. They find it ridiculous how slow they are swimming at dual meets as if they have been swimming in a pool of syrup.

A true high school swim meet is not at all about swimming. It’s not about the times you went, but about the place you got. It’s about whether or not you obliterated the opposing team with an avalanche of points. It’s not about the technique of your underwaters or the rotation of your head during freestyle. It’s about racing your heart out in the last fifteen meters of the 400 freestyle relay while you’re neck n neck with the swimmer from Los Altos and out-touching the girl next to you. It’s about the feeling of adrenaline that races through your body when you see the scoreboard with the number one next to your lane number and when you see that you, you, helped your team beat Los Altos.

It takes some time to adjust to the pubescent reality of high school, understanding that there will be days of defeat where athletes cannot reach their A-game due to piles of homework, understanding that some days your coach will try to kill your weak muscles the day before so that at a different meet, say CCS, you will be focused on the swimming. At CCS, defeating other teams in one-on-one duels does not matter, but the actual times you go and the techniques of your stroke. However, in reality, schools or the newspaper do not really care about how fast you went in your 500 freestyle at that dual meet against Palo Alto, all they care about is if you won/destroyed/swept Paly and whether or not you ten varsity girls were able to beat your six losses from last year.

High school dual meets for swimmers should not be so driven by goals of being recruited. It should be exhilarating; it should be full of laughs and carelessness. You shouldn’t suit up one day with a fierce look on your face, determined to beat your personal best times. You should get on the pool deck dancing around and giggling with your best swim mates before your race to ease any tensions or stress before swimming. You should feel the crispness of the water on deck, smell the pungent chlorine and just swim your heart out.