The coaches were tremendous. A lot of them were high school students from the neighborhood who’d grown up in the program, or college swimmers on summer break, so they knew how to keep things light and fun. It wasn’t so long ago that they were little Green Gators themselves. In fact, some of them still competed for the Gators, alongside their coaching duties, since the league was for swimmers between the ages of five and eighteen. The competition part was almost like an afterthought. Your coach would come around to the tent with heat cards telling you your heat and your lane, maybe talk a little bit about your technique, and when the time came you’d go and swim your race and then hurry back to your card game, or the Frisbee catch you were having. It’s not like the races didn’t matter, but the coaches found the right balance between fun and development. There was no pressure. You didn’t have to be a great swimmer. There were no tryouts. There was a race for everyone, no matter your level.
My parents still remember those races. . . .
MOM: We all looked forward to those meets. They were so much fun. They were neighborhood against neighborhood, so it worked out that everybody knew one another. It was a friendly, community-building-type event, but even then we could see that Missy had a little something special, a little something extra. There was this one meet, one of the bigger ones, the Rocky Mountain Swim League (RMSL), and Missy was swimming the 25-meter backstroke finals. From the very beginning, that was one of her best events, and she won the race and we were all so excited for her. I remember, Dick’s mother had come down to visit with us, so she was with me and Dick as we were watching the race, and I don’t think my mother-in-law had ever seen Missy swim before. She was just so excited, she practically jumped out of her chair. Dick and I liked to play it down. We never wanted to be those parents in the stands who cheered a little too loudly for their own child. We cheered for everyone. In fact, we tried to dial it down when we were cheering for Missy. But Dick’s mother was jumping up and down like a cheerleader. And then, someone made an announcement on the loudspeaker. They said that Missy had just set an RMSL record for six-and-unders. It’s a record that still stands, by the way—24.48 seconds. She wound up setting a bunch of RMSL records and eventually more than sixty Colorado State records, and a lot of them have yet to be broken, but this was probably the first, and we were trying to soft-pedal it, you know. But there was my mother-in-law, just over the moon about it. She couldn’t believe it. She started tugging at Dick’s sleeve, saying, “She’s gonna be an Olympian someday, Dick!” Best we can remember, that’s the first time anyone in the family ever talked about Missy and the Olympics. It was never about that, for us. If anything, it was a little embarrassing, having Missy’s grandmother jumping up and down like that, yelling about the Olympics.
I’m not so sure about pinning that first Olympic thought on my grandmother, although I do have a specific memory of that day. But I also have a specific memory of the Olympics that same summer—the 2000 games, which were held in Sydney, Australia—and wanting to be just like the American swimmers I was watching on television. However, I also wanted to be just like the high school swimmers who worked as coaches in the club. To me, those were my role models, my ideals, so despite the family legend, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that this first summer of “competitive” swimming lit any kind of Olympic fire in me. Mom’s right—it wasn’t about that, not then. But what it was about was building friendships and fun, building my confidence. It was a place to put all that bundled-up energy you have when you’re five years old, combined with a competitive streak that had yet to really show itself. Deep down, it was there. That would explain the RMSL record, right? But it wasn’t something I recognized or knew to tap into. It was in the way I was wired, and during swim season it started to come out in the pool. But then, in winter, it came out on the slopes, or maybe on the basketball court.
It didn’t have to be about swimming. Not just yet.
One thing my father never wanted to do was be my coach. He couldn’t really coach me in swimming, but he certainly had the tools to coach basketball, volleyball, or soccer. He knew those games well enough to grab a whistle and get a group of little girls into fighting shape. That’s how it goes in youth sports, in most communities. A mom or dad with an athletic background steps up and volunteers for the job. But that’s not always the best situation for young athletes, especially for the kid whose mom or dad is the one with the whistle. It’s not that the parents aren’t “qualified” to run the show, but in a lot of cases it can lead to a conflict of interests, and incidents of favoritism, and all kinds of tensions and weirdness that just don’t belong in youth sports. Truth is, all it takes is someone who can motivate his or her young charges, someone who is good with kids, someone who understands the game and the concept of teamwork . . . but when that same “someone” has a child on the team, things can sometimes get complicated.
As a former college football player, Dad certainly fit the description, but he wanted no part of it.
Why? I’ll let him explain. . . .
DAD: My father was my coach when I was a kid, and it was brutal. He was the sponsor of our softball team. Franklin Electric, that was his company at the time. And this was well beyond the age when parents were doing the coaching. This was a group of high school boys, age fifteen to eighteen. I was twelve, going on thirteen, but he put me on the team, and the other boys all resented it. I was a fumbling idiot, compared to these other boys. I made bad play after bad play, screwed up every which way, and of course my father rode me about it on the way home. And I hated him for putting me in this position. It completely undermined my confidence. With boys my own age, I probably would have done just fine, but in this situation I was a little overmatched, out of my league, and the boys on the team were all bitter about the fact that I was the sponsor’s son, the coach’s son. I’d probably taken a spot in the lineup that should have gone to one of their friends, and that just wasn’t right, so when I became a parent, I made a decision early on that I wouldn’t get anywhere near the sidelines when Missy started playing sports. It wasn’t even a decision. It was a nonstarter. You see it all the time, dads coaching their kids, and I don’t agree with it. You can’t put objectivity into it when it’s your own flesh and blood. It’s not good for the child, and it’s not good for the team. Even the most well-meaning parent will have his judgment clouded, so it doesn’t make sense to go down that road. And as Missy became more and more involved in swimming, D.A. and I tried to steer clear of her coaches there as well. Our thing was always to let them do their thing, to stay out of the way. The coaches should coach, and the parents should parent. The lines were clear. You can have all sorts of mature discussions with your kid’s coaches, try to understand what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, but you get into trouble as soon as a parent steps over the line and says, “Well, I think you should be doing this. . . .”
Dad stayed out of the way, but Mom was very involved, in a sideline capacity. She would often be the team manager, or the “team mom”—a very different role than a coach, of course, without all the potential for conflict and tension. If you know my mother, she’s the kind of person who can’t not be involved, so she found a way to limit her involvement to the more social or emotional aspects of sports, away from the pool or the field. This was her way to help grow my game—by growing me. She’d talk to me about what was going on, make a special point to learn the names of all my teammates and to make friends with their parents, but her “coaching” input never went beyond, “Did you have fun?” or “Did you do your best?”
When summer was over I was busy with soccer, basketball—whatever was in season. That relentless spirit that underlines everything I do in the pool? It all started on those other fields of play. I was a competitive kid. (How’s that for an understatement?) What I loved about soccer and basketball were the team elements of the game. Club swimming was a lot like that, too. In fact, I’ve always thought of swimming as a team sport.
A lot of people don’t see it the same way, but they’re not swimmers. If you’ve ever competed for a youth-league swim team, a club team, a school team, or even for your country, you’ll know that everybody’s pulling for one another and pushing one another, in and out of the pool. Sure, there were different elements at play. With soccer, there were all those other girls you could lean on, learn from, pass the ball to. I liked that, too, and in a lot of ways it was just like swimming, but it’s not like I was comparing one activity to another, trying to choose between them. There was time enough for everything back then.
Our soccer coach, Dallas, gave us all nicknames. Mine was “Boomer,” because my very favorite thing to do was kick the ball as far as I could. That was my signature move. I wasn’t too worried about linking my passes or controlling the ball. To be honest, I wasn’t really even worried about making sure the ball was going in the right direction. I just wanted to kick it clear across town. In basketball, I played alongside one of my best friends, Jessica, and she was just as tall as me, so the other teams started calling us the “Twin Towers.” In swimming, my father came up with the nickname “Missy the Missile,” and it seemed to stick.
I was one of those kids who was into everything. And my parents were with me the whole way. Every game, every meet, every activity or gathering, one of them would drop whatever they were doing and be there to support me. They wouldn’t go to practices, but they were available to help me get ready for practices, to shuttle me back and forth, to ask me how things went. (And, full disclosure, they’d be the first parents at pickup time, usually arriving a couple of minutes early to catch at least the tail end of practice, so they could get some idea of what I was up to, the kinds of things we were working on.) I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of athletes, in a variety of sports, and almost all of them were blessed with parents who were also very much present in this way. The lesson? Make time for your kids. Make their interests your own. This doesn’t mean you have to be a helicopter parent and monitor your child’s every activity, but if he or she expresses an interest in something, and if there’s a way to show your support for that interest, it’s probably a good idea to do so. Not because you’re out to raise a champion, but because you want your child to be grounded, and well-rounded. Because you want to show love and support. I can’t tell you how many times one of my little teammates would look up into the bleachers, searching for a parent or family member who’d come to cheer her on, only to turn away disappointed. Obviously, it’s not always possible for parents to be as fully present as my mom and dad were able to be for me. After-school sports tend to happen on weekday afternoons, when a lot of people are stuck at work. Weekend activities can sometimes conflict with a family’s busy schedule, especially if there are other children. But in our house, there was just me, and my parents had waited so long to have me, and jumped through so many hoops to have me, they didn’t want to miss a thing, so they made it a special point to be there for me. Always.
Again, this wasn’t anything my parents talked about with me. It wasn’t any kind of strategy. It’s just who they were, where their priorities were. They weren’t out to help me build a solid foundation for an athletic career, only to build a solid foundation for a lifetime. I’m so grateful they took the time and the trouble. Although, if you’d ask them, they’d tell you that it was no trouble at all. That there was no place they’d rather have been than on those sidelines, cheering me on.
I’d been swimming for two summers with the Heritage Green Gators, and I just couldn’t get enough of it, so I went to my mother and said, “Mom, I want to do more.”
I wanted to be in the water more, swim more, compete more. So Mom started calling around, looking for a place where I could swim year-round. She’d already spoken to a lot of neighborhood parents around the pool, so she had a place to start, but the first team we found wasn’t exactly the best fit. A lot of my older friends had already joined the program, so I was excited to be with them. Trouble was, they had a coach in the group ahead of me who sometimes filled in at our practices. He walked up and down the pool deck with a big stick he used to swat against the side of the pool. It was so intimidating! If you did something he didn’t like, or even if he just wanted you to get out of the pool so he could work with you on your stroke, he’d bark at you in this thick accent. He’d yell, for no good reason. He scared the daylights out of me. I loved the coaches assigned to our group, but I knew that once I was moved up to the next level I’d have to work with this strict European coach, so I think I shut down. I started coming up with excuses why I needed to miss practice. I’d say I had a headache, or that my knee hurt, whatever. It was so totally unlike me, to want to bail on practice like that, and my mother could tell straightaway something was up, so she let it go a time or two before finally calling me on it.
She said, “What’s going on here, Missy? Usually, I can’t keep you away from the pool or from your friends. This isn’t like you.”
She was right. It wasn’t like me, but I was too young to put what I was feeling into words, too young to fully understand what was going on with me, so I just shrugged and said, “I don’t really like swimming anymore. I don’t think I want to go.”
A lot of parents would have let the conversation rest right there, but Mom’s antennae must’ve picked up on something, because she kept after me. “Did something happen with your friends?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I love my friends.”
“Did something happen with one of your coaches?” she asked.
I shook my head again. “No,” I said. “I love my coaches.” And then I waited a long beat and added, “Now . . .”
Right away, she knew. She put two and two together and came up with four before either one of us even knew the equation. Okay, so if I liked my coaches now, it must’ve meant I didn’t like some of the other coaches I’d been exposed to. Just by pushing me a little bit, by keeping the conversation going, my mother figured out that it was this other coach who was upsetting me, this other coach who loomed in my path, because as I progressed I would be assigned to his group. There was no avoiding it, unless I refused to get any better and stayed exactly where I was, in the lower group. My parents couldn’t really advocate for me on this one. This coach was probably a very good coach. He had a lot of students who traveled a long way to swim with him. But he was just so strict, so rigid, so cheerless. I was too afraid of him to even approach him with a simple question. I’d see him walking along the pool deck with that stick of his and want to be anywhere else but in that pool. I know that this coaching “style” might work for some people, but I knew it wasn’t the best for me.
At this early, early stage in my swimming “career,” it was nothing to switch me to a different team. Swimming was supposed to be a fun after-school activity, that’s all. If I wasn’t having fun, there were other things I could be doing. This wasn’t the time to teach me a lesson, or toughen me up, or encourage me to find a way to make things work with this difficult coach. And it’s not like my parents were quick to give me an easy out, or to help me run from my problems. No, this wasn’t that. This was just me, letting it be known in my not-so-subtle way that this man terrified me and that I wanted to steer clear.
So what did my parents do? They found another swim team for me to join, and looking back I think they handled the hiccup in just the right way. Understand, this kind of thing happens all the time in youth sports. A kid can get turned off to an activity because he or she is confronted with an individual the kid just doesn’t want to deal with. And at a certain age, at a certain level, the kid shouldn’t have to. Who knows what makes a kid shut down, or turn off to a sport? There can be a personality clash, or a clash of wills, or something as simple as a clash of styles between the way a coach teaches and an athlete learns. But at seven years old, none of that really mattered to my parents. I don’t believe they even thought along these lines. All they knew was that I wasn’t
happy, so they told me they would find another team for me to join.
Just like that, my headaches disappeared. My knee started feeling better. And when the mean coach from the more advanced group subbed in on one of our practices, I no longer dreaded it so much because I knew it was only a temporary thing. I knew he wouldn’t be my coach going forward.
All was right in my little world.
Second time around, Mom’s search pointed us to the Colorado Stars, one of the more popular club teams in our area. This is where serendipity, or fate, or maybe even divine guidance finds its way into my story, because my very first Stars practice was also the very first day for Todd Schmitz, the coach who took me all the way to the Olympics! How crazy is that? Todd had grown up in North Dakota but moved to Colorado to swim at Metropolitan State University and never left. He’d studied to be a certified financial planner, but after graduation he started bartending and coaching while he was figuring out his next move. He was an assistant swimming coach for a high school girls team, and a coach for a summer-league team that actually competed against the Heritage Green Gators, and it just worked out that he signed on to coach the youngest group of Stars—the Starfish, our eight-and-under division—around the time my parents were signing me up. His first day was my first day, so we had this special connection right away. Here was this young guy, early twenties, with long hair (that he wore in a ponytail, mind you) and a cool, spirited attitude. He was just so much fun. I’ve met a lot of coaches in my day, and they’ve come in all sizes and stripes, in all different demeanors, but none of them are quite like Todd. One of his great strengths as a coach, whether he’s coaching at the youth level or at the national-team level, is he knows that if his swimmers have a blast they’ll keep coming back. His style was in complete contrast to the style of that strict European coach—the dude with the big thwacking stick.
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