CDST Spring Newsletter
California Dolphins Swim Team
Spring Newsletter
In this issue:
- Schedule Changes
- Meet Schedule
- Article for parents
- Rules of Swimming-A Primer
- Comments from Coach Rob
Schedule Changes:
We will be instituting a number of changes to our training schedule over the next little while to accommodate our own Summer team program as well as some scheduling issues at the James Logan High School Swimming Pool.
We will be having our regular Saturday morning practice this weekend at the James Logan pool.
Elite Swimmers: 7:00-9:00 AM
Platinum Swimmers: 7:30-9:00 AM
The James Logan pool will be closed on Monday (Memorial Day) so we will be swimming in the morning at the Calphin Pool.
Elite Swimmers: 7:00-9:00 AM
Platinum Swimmers: 7:30-9:00 AM
Silver Swimmers: 9:00-10:00 AM
The James Logan High School Swim team is having their year-end Bar BQ next Wednesday (June 1) and the pool will not be available. There will be no swimming on this day.
Our Summer team will start on Monday June 6th which will necessitate a couple of small changes to our training schedule. From Monday June 6th to Friday June 24 the following schedule will be in effect:
Elite Group: 6:00-8:00 PM (No Change)
Platinum Group: 6:00-7:30 PM (No Change)
Silver Group: 7:00-8:00 PM (one hour later)
Summer Team One: 6:00-7:00 PM
Summer Team Two: 7:00-8:00 PM
After Monday June 27th, the Union City leisure Services program expands and we are very limited as to the pool times available to us in the afternoon. After looking at many different options, the board and coaching staff have agreed on the following training schedule from Monday June 27th to the end of the season in August:
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Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
Saturday |
| Elite |
7-9 AM |
7-9 AM |
7-9 AM |
7-9 AM |
7-9 AM |
7-9 AM |
| Platinum |
7-8:30 AM |
7-8:30 AM |
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7-8:30 AM |
7-8:30 AM |
7:30-9:00 AM |
| Silver |
8-9 AM |
8-9 AM |
|
8-9 AM |
8-9 AM |
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| Summer Team 1 |
6-7 PM (4 Lanes) |
6-7 PM (4 lanes) |
6-7 PM (4 Lanes) |
6-7 PM (4 lanes) |
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|
| Summer Team 2 |
7-8 PM (4 Lanes) |
7-8 PM (4 Lanes) |
7-8 PM (4 Lanes) |
7-8 PM (4 Lanes) |
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While this is not the best of all worlds, we feel that addresses our major issues and allows the whole team to still be at James Logan High School. If you will have problems with getting your child to and from the pool because of work schedules please talk to a Board Member. We can help set up car pools to help.
Summer Meet Schedule:
June 11-12 Crow Canyon Sharks San Ramon CBA+ Long Course
This meet is filled
June 25-26 Orinda Swimming Moraga CBA+ Long Course
This meet is filled
June 25-26* Bear Swimming San Pablo CBA+ Long Course
*If you were unable to get into either the Crow Canyon or Orinda meets, please sign up for this one
July 7-10 San Jose Swimming San Jose LC Junior Olympics
July 23-24 De Anza Cupertino Saratoga CBA+ Short Course
July 27-31 Terrapins Swimming Concord LC Far Westerns
August 12-14 Walnut Creek Aquabears Walnut Creek CBA+ Short Course
An Article for new and old parents from United States Swimming:
HOW TO BE A WINNING PARENT
By Dr. Alan Goldberg, Competitive Advantage
If you want your child to come out of his youth sports experience a winner, (feeling good about himself and having a healthy attitude towards sports) then he needs your help! You are a vital and important part of the coach-athlete-parent team. If you do your job correctly and play YOUR position well, then your child will learn the sport faster, perform better, really have fun and have his self-esteem enhanced as a result. His sport experience will serve as a positive model for him to follow as he approaches other challenges and obstacles throughout life. If you "drop the ball" or run the wrong way with it, your child will stop learning, experience performance difficulties and blocks, and begin to really hate the sport. And that's the GOOD news! Further, your relationship with him will probably suffer significantly. As a result, he will come out of this experience burdened with feelings of failure, inadequacy and low self-esteem, feelings that will general¬ize to other areas in his life. Your child and his coach need you ON the team. They can't win without YOU! The following are a list of useful facts, guidelines and strategies for you to use to make you more skilled in the youth sport game. Remember, no wins unless everyone wins. We need you on the team!
1. When defined the RIGHT way, competition in youth sports is both good and healthy and teaches children a variety of important life skills. The word "compete" comes from the Latin words 'com" and "petere" which mean together and seeking respectively. The true definition of competition is a seeking TOGETHER where your opponent is your partner, NOT the enemy! The better he performs the more chance you have of having a peak performance. Sport is about learning to deal with challenges and obstacles. Without a worthy opponent, without any challenges sport is not so much fun. The more the challenge the better the opportunity you have to go beyond your limits. World records are consistently broken and set at the Olympics because the best athletes in the world are "seeking together", challenging each other to enhanced performance. Your child should NEVER be taught to view his opponent as the "bad guy", the enemy or someone to be hated and "destroyed". Do NOT model this attitude!! Instead, talk to and make friends with parents of your child's opponent. Root for great performances, good plays, NOT just for the winner!
2. ENCOURAGE YOUR CHILD TO COMPETE AGAINST HIMSELF. The ultimate goal of the sport experience is to challenge oneself and continually improve. Unfortunately, judging improvement by winning and losing is both an unfair and inaccurate measure. Winning in sports is about doing the best YOU can do, SEPARATE from the outcome or the play of your opponent. Children should be encouraged to compete against their own potential, i.e. Peter and Patty Potential. That is, the boys should focus on beating "Peter,” competing against themselves while the girls challenge "Patty.” When your child has this focus and plays to better himself instead of beating someone else, he will be more relaxed, have more fun and therefore perform better.
3. DO NOT DEFINE SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN TERMS OF WINNING AND LOSING. As a corollary to #2, one of the main purposes of the youth sports experience is skill acquisition and mastery. When a child performs to his potential and loses it is criminal to focus on the outcome and become critical. If a child plays his very best and loses, you need to help him feel like a winner! Similarly, when a child or team performs far below their potential but wins, this is NOT cause to feel like a winner. Help your child make this important separation between success and failure and winning and losing. Remember, if you define success and failure in terms of winning and losing, you're playing a losing game with your child!
4. BE SUPPORTIVE, DO NOT COACH! Your role on the parent-coach-athlete team is as a Support player with a capital S!! You need to be your child's best fan. UNCONDITIONALLY!!! Leave the coaching and instruction to the coach. Provide encouragement, support, empathy, transportation, money, help with fund-raisers, etc., BUT...DO NOT COACH! Most parents that get into trouble with their children do so because they forget the important position that they play. Coaching interferes with your role as supporter and fan. The last thing your child needs and wants to hear from you after a disappointing performance or loss is what they did technically or strategically wrong. Keep your role as a parent on the team separate from that as coach, and if, by necessity you actually get stuck in the almost no-win position of having to coach your child, try to maintain this separation of roles, ie. on the deck, field or court say, "'Now I'm talking to you as a coach", at home say, "'Now I'm talking to you as a parent". Don't parent when you coach and don't coach at home when you're supposed to be parenting.
5. HELP MAKE THE SPORT FUN FOR YOUR CHILD. It's a time proven principle of peak performance that the more fun an athlete is having, the more he will learn and the better he will perform. Fun MUST be present for peak performance to happen at EVERY level of sports from youth to world class competitor! When a child stops having fun and begins to dread practice or competition, it's time for you as a parent to become concerned! When the sport or game becomes too serious, athletes have a tendency to burn out and become susceptible to repetitive performance problems. An easy rule of thumb: IF YOUR CHILD IS NOT ENJOYING WHAT HE ARE DOING NOR LOVING THE HECK OUT OF IT, INVESTIGATE!! What is going on that's preventing him from having fun? Is it the coaching? The pressure? Is it YOU??! Keep in mind that being in a highly competitive program does NOT mean that there is no room for fun. The child that continues to play long after the fun is gone will soon become a drop out statistic.
6. WHOSE GOAL IS IT? #5 leads us to a very important question! Why is your child participating in the sport? Is she doing it because she wants to, for herself, or because of you. When an athlete has problems in her sport do you talk about them as "our" problems, "our jump isn't high enough", "we're having trouble with our flip turn,” etc. Are they playing because they don't want to disappoint you, because they know how important the sport is to you? Are they playing for rewards and "bonuses" that you give out? Are their goals and aspirations YOURS or theirs? How invested are you in their success and failure? If they are competing to please you or for your vicarious glory they are in it for the wrong reasons! Further, if they stay involved for you, ultimately everyone loses. It is quite normal and healthy to want your child to excel and be as successful as possible. BUT, you cannot make this happen by pressuring her with your expectations or by using guilt or bribery to keep her involved. If they have their own reasons and own goals for participating, they will be FAR more motivated to excel and therefore far more successful.
7. YOUR CHILD IS NOT HIS PERFORMANCE. LOVE HIM UNCONDITONALLY. Do NOT equate your child's self-worth and lovability with his performance. The MOST tragic and damaging mistake I see parents continually make is punishing a child for a bad performance by withdrawing emotionally from him. A child loses a race, strikes out or misses an easy shot on goal and the parent responds with disgust, anger and withdrawal of love and approval. CAUTION: Only use this strategy if you want to damage your child emotionally and ruin your relationship with him. In the 88 Olympics, when Greg Louganis needed and got a perfect l0 on his last dive to overtake the Chinese diver for the gold medal, his last thought before he went was, "'If I don't make it, my mother will still love me".
8. REMEMBER THE IMPORTANCE OF SELF-ESTEEM IN ALL OF YOUR INTERACTIONS WITH YOUR CHILD-ATHLETE. Athletes of all ages and levels perform in DIRECT relationship to how they feel about themselves. When your child is in an athletic environment that boosts his self-esteem, he will learn faster, enjoy himself more and perform better under competitive pressure. One thing we all want as children and NEVER stop wanting is to be loved and accepted, and to have our parents feel good about what we do. This is how self-esteem gets established. When your interactions with your child make him feel good about himself, he will, in turn, learn to treat himself this very same way. This does NOT mean that you have to incongruently compliment your child for a great effort after he has just performed miserably. In this situation being empathic and sensitive to his feelings is what's called for. Self-esteem makes the world go round. Make your child feel good about himself and you've given him a gift that lasts a lifetime. Do NOT interact with your child in a way that assaults his self-esteem by degrading, embarrassing or humiliating him. If you continually put your child down or minimize his accomplishments not only will he learn to do this to himself throughout his life, but he will also repeat YOUR mistake with HIS children!
9. GIVE YOUR CHILD THE GIFT OF FAILURE. If you really want your child to be as happy and as successful as possible in everything that he does, teach him how to fail! The most successful people in and out of sports do two things differently than everyone else. FIRST, they are more willing to take risks and therefore fail more frequently. SECOND, they use their failures in a positive way as a source of motivation and feedback to improve. Our society is generally negative and teaches us that failure is bad, a cause for humiliation and embarrassment and something to be avoided at all costs. Fear of failure or humiliation causes one to be tentative and non-active. In fact, most performance blocks and poor performances are a direct result of the athlete being preoccupied with failing or messing up. You can't learn to walk without falling enough times. Each time that you fall your body gets valuable information on how to do it better. You can't be successful or have peak performances if you are concerned with losing or failing. Teach your child how to view setbacks, mistakes and risk-taking positively and you'll have given him the key to a lifetime of success. Failure is the PERFECT stepping stone to success.
10. CHALLENGE-DON'T THREATEN. Many parents directly or indirectly use guilt and threats as a way to "motivate" their child to perform better. Performance studies clearly indicate that while threats may provide short term results, the long term costs in terms of psychological health and performance are devastating. Using fear as a motivator is probably one of the worst dynamics you could set up with your child. Threats take the fun out of performance and directly lead to your child performing terribly. IMPLICIT in a threat, (do this or else!) is your OWN anxiety that you do not believe the child is capable. Communicating this lack of belief, even indirectly is further devastating to the child's performance. A challenge does not entail loss or negative consequences should the athlete fail. Further, implicit in a challenge is the empowering belief, “I think that you can do it".
11. STRESS PROCESS (skill acquisition, mastery and having fun), NOT OUTCOME. When athletes choke under pressure and perform far below their potential, a very common cause of this is a focus on the outcome of the performance, i.e. win/lose, instead of the process. In any peak performance, the athlete is totally oblivious to the outcome and instead is completely absorbed in the here and now of the actual performance. An outcome focus will almost always distract and tighten up the athlete insuring a bad performance. Furthermore focusing on the outcome, which is completely out of the athlete's control will raise his anxiety to a performance inhibiting level. So IF you TRULY want your child to win, help get his focus AWAY from how important the contest is and have him focus on the task at hand. Supportive parents de-emphasize winning and instead stress learning the skills and playing the game.
12. AVOID COMPARISONS AND RESPECT DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES. Supportive parents do not use other athletes that their child competes against to compare and thus evaluate their child's progress. Comparisons are useless, inaccurate and destructive. Each child matures differently and the process of comparison ignores significant distorting effects of developmental differences. For example, two 12 year old boys may only have their age in common! One may physically have the build and perform like a 16 year old while the other, a late developer, may have the physical size and attribute of a 9 year old. Performance comparisons can prematurely turn off otherwise talented athletes on their sport. The only value of comparisons is in teaching. If one child demonstrates proper technique, that child can be used comparatively as a model ONLY! For your child to do his very best he needs to learn to stay within himself. Worrying about how another athlete is doing interferes with him doing this.
13. TEACH YOUR CHILD TO HAVE A PERSPECTIVE ON THE SPORTS EXPERIENCE. The sports media in this country would like you to believe that sports and winning/losing are larger than life. The fact that it is just a game frequently gets lost in translation. This lack of perspective frequently trickles down to the youth sport level and young athletes often come away from competition with a distorted view of themselves and how they performed. Parents need to help their children develop realistic expectations about themselves, their abilities and how they played, without robbing the child of his dreams. Swimming a lifetime best time and coming in dead last is a cause for celebration, not depression. Similarly, losing the conference championships does not mean that the sun will not rise tomorrow.
A Rules Primer from USA Swimming:
The technical rules of swimming are designed to provide fair and equitable conditions of competition and to promote uniformity in the sport. Each swimming stroke has specific rules designed to ensure that no swimmer gets an unfair competitive advantage over another swimmer.
Trained officials observe the swimmers during each event to ensure compliance with these technical rules. If a swimmer commits an infraction of the rules that is observed by an officIal, a disqualification (DQ) will result. This means that the swimmer will not receive an official time and will not be eligible for an award in that event. A disqualification may result from actions such as not getting to the starting blocks on time, false starting, performing strokes in an illegal manner, or unsportsmanlike conduct.
DQs are also a result of technical rules violations. They include but are not limited to:
- Freestyle:Walking on the bottom, pulling on the lane rope, not touching the wall on a turn, or not completing the distance.
- Backstroke:Pulling or kicking into the wall once a swimmer has turned passed the vertical onto the breast. Turning onto the breast before touching the wall with the hand at the finish of the race.
- Breaststroke:An illegal kick such as flutter (freestyle), dolphin (butterfly), or scissors (side stroke); not on the breast; alternating movements of the arms; taking two arm strokes or two leg kicks while the head is under water; touching with only one hand at the turns or finish.
- Butterfly:Alternating movements of the arms or legs; pushing the arms forward under instead of over the water surface (underwater recovery); a breaststroke style of kick; touching with only one hand at the turns or finish.
For specific language on any technical rules consult the USA Swimming Rules and Regulations book. Violations of the rules are reported to the Referee. The rules require that every reasonable effort be made to notify the swimmer or his coach of the reason for the disqualification. If your child is disqualified in an event, be supportive rather than critical. For beginning swimmers, a disqualification should be treated as a learning experience, not as a punishment. A disqualification alerts the swimmer and coach to what portions of the swimmer's stroke need to be corrected. They should be considered in the same light as an incorrect answer in schoolwork-they point out areas that need further practice. Disqualifications are necessary to keep the competition fair and equitable for all competitors. A supportive attitude on the part of the official, coach, and parent can make a positive situation out of the disqualification.
From the Mind of Coach Rob…(I Know kinda scary stuff…)
The last month for our team has been a great one. I have to pay credit to those swimmers in the Elite Group. You folks have absolutely stepped up and taken my challenge to work harder…swim faster…and most importantly swim smarter! The workouts have been extra challenging and each and every time I have come up with a longer harder and faster set…each of you have taken on the challenge and outperformed even my expectations. We have been averaging over 6000 yards per practice! Not just swimming, but competing against yourselves and each other. So congrats to those elite swimmers who are really stepping it up!
We have been talking a lot about getting out of your “comfort zone” in regards to training. Each swimmer on this team, whether you are in the silver, platinum or elite group has the amazing capacity to achieve so much more than you think you can! Sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking “that’s good enough”. I have a personal mantra that I try to live by and that is:
“Good enough is never enough”
A great example of what I mean is this example. Swimmer A has been training for 4 years. They are a Junior Olympic Finalist and Far Western Qualifier. Problem is that they have been at this level for 2 years! Swimmer A’s goal is to break 55 seconds for the 100 freestyle
In practice, the coach gives the swimmers a set of 16 X 100 Freestyle @ 1:25. For the last six months, swimmer A has consistently done well in this set by posting most of his times around 1:10. The coach challenges him to start out at 1:05 and see how many of the 100’s he can do at that speed. The first time he tries, he can only do about 6 100’s at 1:05 and then he thinks he is getting tired and his times drop off to about 1:15 for the rest of the set. Yet, the next time he swims this set, he is able to do 12 100’s at 1:05…and then the rest of the 100’s are at his old time of 1:10! The next time he tries the set, he can do all of the swims at 1:05! This swimmer was able to get out of his comfort zone and push himself to new levels even he thinks he cannot do. The next time he does the set, he can hold 1:03 on every 100!
At the next swim meet he goes into the 100 free with a lifetime best of 56.5. When he swims the 100 freestyle at the meet, his coach reminds him of what he was able to do in practice over the last few months. Suddenly, 56.5 seems pretty slow and he jumps in and goes a 54 second 100 free! The swimmer realizes that when he was swimming those 100’s at the 1:10 level he was settling for “good enough”.
I know this story is true, because it was the first time I ever went under 55 for the 100 freestyle! So always remember that while you are training never settle for “good enough”. If you hear yourself saying that, all the alarms and stop signs should jump up! If you don’t settle for second best, you won’t be second best…you will be first!
“Why Settle for Good when you can be Great?”
