Six long years ago (though it doesn’t feel like it’s a long time ago) Christian was having a horrible experience with T-Ball so I let him quit --- and then he decided that he would love to RACE kids in the water! The timing was right and we joined the Folsom Sea Otters at 5 years old.
I still remember his first day of practice… It was a chilly day with a decent wind. Borderline raining, but it didn’t. For whatever reason the practice was 1.5 hours long (a long time for a 5 year old!) mostly in the water. After one hour Christian needed to go to the bathroom and when he came out he started crying. He was FREEZING from the wind and he did not want to get back into the water. That’s when Rick, the president of FSO at the time, kneeled down and talked to Christian, telling him how awesome he’s done and telling him that he doesn’t have to get back in… He should go home, warm up and be ready for a fun time tomorrow! That made Christian’s night. The rest of the week I saw similar acts of caring from the board and that’s when I realized the Folsom Sea Otters CARED about their young swimmers. It wasn’t about the fastest, the best or winning – it was about the swimming experience and having fun.
He was so small back then he was barely taller than the starting blocks --- compare that to last year:
After swimming with the Otters for five years Christian wanted to Level Up and instead of just doing clinics in the off-season he wanted to switch from summer rec to year round swimming. He did well, wasn’t near the top of his age group but was learning a lot --- and it was a lot of work. We started with the Sierra Marlins but after some issues with the head coach and board we went with several other families and were founding members of the new Folsom Wahoos swim team. He made Jr. Olympic cuts and was doing well. When I saw this picture I took for the first time I had to double and triple check that this young man on the block was indeed my 10-year old son, swimming was a good workout for him!! (Again compared to 2009 when he first started).
But low and behold Christian got tired of swimming --- too boring at practice to just swim laps back and forth. He lost interest. We took a while to be sure he really wanted to quit and in December (2014) he stopped swimming. Since then whenever anyone asks him the answer is always the same, he’s not interested. He misses his friends but he does not miss swimming at all.
We’ve talked about other options, Water polo, diving, returning to swimming recreationally or year round and the only thing that piqued his interest was Springboard Diving --- so he took a camp over spring break and enjoyed it --- and wants to continue to do it.
It was only a month ago when I talked about summer swimming with Christian and after looking at our schedule he said he didn’t want to do it. He wanted to focus on Boy Scouts and that would mean missing too many meets and the meets were important to him.
So it came as a total surprise when a couple of days ago Christian told me he wants to go back the Otters. Once again we reviewed the schedule and discussed things and now his mind has changed and he wants to do summer rec swimming again… Thankfully there was a spot open in his age group, so now we’re signed up and back in the water starting tonight!
It’s going to be interesting, I got spoiled with year-round swimming as there is only one swim meet a month and for the younger swimmers it is usually in the afternoon… Now we’ll have a swim meet every Saturday and they start early!! Oh well, we’ll miss a bunch of them because of scouts so it won’t be too bad!