More than most organized activities undertaken by kids, summer league swimming offers numerous ways of growing, developing and “winning.”
Some speculate it’s because swimming offers a somewhat unique combination of both personal and team-related achievement. Whatever the cause, below are just a few of the ways your child can “win” by participating in summer league swimming:
- Goal Setting – Kids of all ages are capable of setting a goal or milestone they would like to achieve. Summer league swimming facilitates this with weekly progress towards the goal. Setting a time improvement goal from week to week is an excellent life skill to learn early.
- Learning to Win and Lose – One of life’s many valuable lessons. With summer league swimming, each kid typically swims 3-5 events per meet. So there are plenty of instances to cope with winning and losing. And what’s interesting about swimming is that both winning and losing can result from the same race. For example, your child could place next to last in their heat (losing) but achieve a personal best time (winning).
- Discipline – Swim workouts are tough and they occur just about every day at a time when kids might rather be sleeping, playing video games or doing something else with friends. This makes it a good test of discipline (see goal setting above).
- Making New Friends – The average swim team has more than 100 swimmers and some teams have more than 300.But they are organized by gender and age group. So there are lots of new friends to be made throughout the summer. It’s amazing the camaraderie that develops over such a short period of time with kids from different neighborhoods and schools.
- Physical Exercise – It’s well documented that swimming is absolutely one of the best sports around for physical activity. It is easy on the joints but exercises every single muscle in the body while not missing the heart and lungs.
Of course, managing and supporting a team of any size is a challenge, let alone those with more than 100 swimmers. Curious about SwimTopia and if we can help your team? Sign up for a demo here.
