Team Traditions and Championship Season: A Quick Primer
Team Traditions and Championship Season: A Quick Primer
At Miami Country Day Aquatics, swimmers quickly belong to a second family. Between hours of practicing each afternoon, long bus rides to away meets, cheering one another on for every race, special activities, and meet day attire, these student-athletes become very close to their teammates.
Moreover, Spartan Swimmers come together through team traditions. Between training sessions, captains’ talks, beach days, underdog races, shaving parties, pasta dinners, secret psychers, team chants and more, swimmers find a way to become close and have fun, both in and out of the pool.
Team traditions help shape and reflect the character of a team—past, present, and future. Traditions refocus the coach and athlete. They give perspective, rekindle the spirit of the past, and remind the coaches and team members of what is important. Ultimately, traditions produce successful teams, great memories, lasting friendships, and help establish team legacies.
As we approach the end of the Fall 2013 Spartan Swimming season, and the onset of this year’s interscholastic championships, you may notice many things around the pool deck and wonder what in the world is going on. In the swimming world at large, you are witnessing longstanding traditions and cultural rites, but to the untrained eye, such things may create questions, lack of understanding, and confusion at large.
Over time, in the swimming world, taper (culmination of an arduous journey to forge one’s grit followed by reduced training and overall giddiness from athletes), is trailed closely by feasting (pasta parties), ritual adaptations to one’s person (shaving down), unique outfitting (technical racing suits) and a journey to battle close rivals (championship meets).
The following information serves to initiate one into the storied traditions of the competitive swimming arena, and more specifically, the fabled realm of swimming championship season and all that comes with it.
Team Traditions: Shaved Heads, Mohawks, Dyed Hair and Male Bonding
· http://www.bremertonpatriot.com/sports/116488713.html
· http://www.thepekinois.com/features/2013/01/25/why-swimmers-shave-heads/
· http://videos.nj.com/star-ledger/2010/02/head_shaving_tradition_continu.html
Shaving and Performance Improvement: No More Hairy Legs and A Finely Tuned Sense of the Water
· http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-sense/201005/swimmers-shaving-and-proprioception
· http://www.swimmingscience.net/2013/07/does-shaving-improve-swim-performance.html
Tapering: Finally...Swimming Less to Swim Fast
“A progressive nonlinear reduction of the training load during a variable period of time, in an attempt to reduce the physiological and psychological stress of daily training and optimize sports performance and enhance training adaptations during the taper period.” (Mujika et al. Sports Med. 34:891-927,2004; Thomas & Busso Med. Sci. Sports & Exerc. 37: 1615-1621, 2005)
In other words, after putting in significant work over a period of months, training consists of reduced volume, increased race pace and intensity training with additional rest cycles; swimming less but faster, at the end of the season, in attempts to push the body towards optimal performance.
· http://coachsci.sdsu.edu/swim/bullets/taper6.htm
Technical Racing Suits: Superman Capes Donned for the Big Meet
· http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/30/us-olympics-swimming-idUSTRE7AT32820111130
· http://www.swimmingscience.net/2010/01/what-made-hi-tech-suits-effective.html
· http://www.usms.org/articles/articledisplay.php?aid=377
Pasta Parties: Post Practice Recovery Centered Around Food!
· http://www.swimteammom.com/swim-team/swim-team-pasta-dinner/
· http://blog.northjersey.com/varsityaces/1493/the-pasta-party-argument/
