Bedlam, Torture, and the Sweet Outcomes of the 

Amateur Swim Meet

Pictures don't do justice to the bedlam of a swim meet

On fall and winter Saturdays when most Americans watch football, shop, relax, do yardwork or pursue other activities, thousands of young athletes, their parents, grandparents, and fans pack into swimming facilities all over the nation for day-long swim meets that are bee hives of athletic activity, centers of social interaction, and hot spots of retail commerce. Who knew? 

To uninitiated casual observers like me who had no idea this kind of thing went on, amateur swim meets represent an almost invisible subculture. These confusing conglomerations consume the time and attention of entire families, support a surprising range of entrepreneurial endeavors, produce as many tears as smiles among young participants, and look like an incomprehensible mass of organized chaos. Until our granddaughter became involved with a swim team, I was clueless about how many products, terms, issues, dreams, and sheer numbers of people were involved in these events that occur in pools all over the nation.

Our granddaughter began her competitive swimming career in the pools of Pittsburgh in indoor events held in regional high schools. The first struggle involved with attending one of these marathons is finding a place to park. That’s when the enormity of the events first set in for me. The events attract hundreds of swimmers, their parents, friends, and other family members who gobble up limited parking spaces early in the morning. Late starters like me can look forward to a long cold walk.

Some meets charge a nominal fee for people to attend. Volunteers, usually moms, sit at tables to collect admission. Invariably, they have a child with them who insists on handing you your change and stamping the back of your hand with a glob of black ink thus branding you as okay to pass in and out. Too often, they perform those duties with their own candy coated sticky gooey hands imbuing your own hands with the same condition. Once inside, after washing your hands, the challenge is to secure a “heat sheet”—a thick collection of stapled pages containing a dense list of swimmers’ names, their best times in each of the four events they may be participating in, and a schedule of events, heats, and lanes in which they will swim throughout the meet. These heat sheets are, of course, for sale only.

Whoever arranges the heats and events is an evil diabolical genius to folks like me who are used to sports like football and basketball that get you in and out in a set amount of time. Somehow, it always turns out that your swimmer participates in one event at say 9 a.m., and then has nothing to do until their next event at like 2 p.m. Since I’m really only interested in my swimmer’s events, that means I have nothing to do for hours either and that’s the hardest part the whole endeavor.

The bare footed swimmers usually hang out with teammates at some designated location while wrapped in damp towels but families are condemned to fritter away the idle hours in the school cafeteria where snacks like hot dogs and pizzas are available along with something else I never encountered before swim meets entered my life—the “walking taco.” It’s a small bag of opened Frito corn chips in which a chili-like concoction has been poured. The eater of this treat then uses his or her fingers to fish out bits of the messy yet crunchy snack.

Cafeteria calm before the swim meet storm

The cafeterias are usually filled with parents patiently trying to fill the empty hours. One activity they reluctantly and often ineffectually pursue is placating the younger siblings of competing swimmers. Their patience with the whole affair is more seriously limited than geezers like me. For that challenge, parents look to their overstuffed book bags for games, toys or anything else they had the foresight to pack in defense against whiny children who just want to go home. As a result, the room is littered with unread Harry Potter books, board games, playing cards, I-Pads, and other weapons employed in the battle against slow moving clocks.

The admission charge, snack bar, and sale of heat sheets are just the beginnings of the mini-economy that exists at these events. A great deal of money changes hands at a traditional swim meet. There’s usually an area where parents and grandparents can shop for swim suits, goggles, caps and other accouterments for their swimmers at premium prices by a range of vendors. Then, there’s an area where tee shirt and sweatshirt entrepreneurs have set up shop. For a hefty fee, they will emboss any piece of overpriced clothing purchased from them with clever swim sayings or swim team logos. Then, there are candy sales people who will deliver the selected candy along with a personalized message of best wishes to individual swimmers, again for a fee. At some meets, photographers can be commissioned to snap specific swimmers in action. It’s a murder’s row of wallet drainers for hapless well-meaning grandparents.

At some meets, a busy volunteer will keep track of the events and occasionally update a white board in a corner of the cafeteria by writing out the number of the event under way so that parents and swimmers can keep track of their next appearance. Other events require parents to gather courage and poke their heads into the chaos of the pool area for a visual assessment every now and then.

The pool area is where the greatest bedlam occurs. There is usually a bleacher section packed with discarded winter coats, swimmers’ equipment bags, glazed-over observers who are between events and are too zoned out from boredom to succumb to the cafeteria’s charms, and super-intense swim fans who are supercharged and glued to the action. It must be some sort of unofficial requirement that at least 90 percent of the people in the stands be engaged in loud conversation. The constant conversational buzzing that results, combined with the horns signaling race starts, the swimmers lined up to compete while chatting on the pool deck, a disembodied voice making incomprehensible announcements over loud and fuzzy-sounding PA systems, and coaches and parents shouting instructions and encouragement to their swimmers in the pool make for an overwhelming noise attack to sensitive ears. It also looks like no one really knows what is going on but, strangely, they really do.

Very serious swim meet officials

There’s a host of volunteer swim meet officials lining the pool. These are folks, many of whom are festooned with headset communication devices, stop watches, clipboards and ultra-serious looks on their faces, are trained to watch each swimmer in each event. They keep a close eye out for swimmers who pull or kick into the wall during the backstroke; use a flutter, dolphin or scissors stroke or kick during the breaststroke; or push their arms forward under instead of over the water surface in the butterfly; or any other number of other possible infractions. If they spot a violation, swimmers are disqualified or “DQed.” For my first few meets, I though DQ had something to do with frozen custard. 

There are timers for each lane. There’s also a long table at one end of the pool where more officials scribble something down on stacks of papers and some poor soul charged with entering all this information onto a computer program sits in focused silence.In all this noise and chaos, it is a miracle when the swimmers know it is their turn to swim. Swimmers usually write the numbers of their events, heats and assigned swim lanes on their arms in ink after consulting with coaches at the beginning of the day. Young swimmers like to also write clever sayings on their backs like “eat my bubbles.”

After each race, results are posted on the scoreboard—for about 15 seconds before the next race begins. Swimmers usually have to ask the timers for their results or wait till they are posted on some hallway with slippery wet floors in the vicinity of the pool after a computer prints them all out. Shaving time off each race is the ultimate goal of each swimmer so they can improve their seed in the next meet in which they participate. Some swimmers emerge from the water gleeful. Others squirt tears of disappointment. Coaches console and congratulate as needed. Then it’s off to the waiting area for a couple hours until the next event.

The long wait as done in California

California style - long jacket and Uggs

After our granddaughter moved to California and resumed her swimming career there, I got a taste of how it’s done in warmer environments. All swim meets out there are held outside. Sometimes, during the meet I observed, the temperature was in the 40s for the swimmers’ morning warm ups. There isn’t any school cafeteria to kill off the hours of waiting so instead, parents haul in camping chairs, sleeping bags to lay on, coolers, backpacks full of towels, snacks, and electronic devices and erect tailgate canopy shelters to spend the day under. At the Far West event in Pleasanton, CA, just outside San Francisco, there were acres of canopies in the grass area outside the pool. There were food vendors and retail sales areas with a swimming focus and the traditional lack of parking. The chaos was the same, it was just outdoors so the noise wasn’t quite as disorienting. There seemed to be a bit more fashion involved in California. Between swimming events, young swimmers there seemed to prefer wearing full-length coat-like garments accentuated by those winter boots called Uggs.

If you want to see your swimmer at a California meet,
you have to work your way through this.

But, there were no bleachers and if you wanted to see your swimmer in action, you had to do your best to gaze through the noisy and constantly moving lines of coaches, officials, fellow observers and swimmers waiting for their next event.

Happy relay swimmers (our granddaughter far right)

Whether it’s Pittsburgh, California, or even Iowa or Maine, these swim meets are grueling tests of endurance for the swimmers and their coaches who practice almost every day, and their supporters who battle the chaotic conditions and hours of inactivity that surround the events. 

But, when your swimmer emerges from the blue water made choppy by the splashes and strokes of non-stop competition and beams with satisfaction over a performance that erased a half-second off her previous time, your frustration  over the boredom, inactivity, parking woes, and irritations over obstructed views melts away and is replaced with a glow of love and pride. That makes it worth the bedlam, boredom and challenge.