Mark Seguin: Hello everybody, Mark Seguin, Minnesota Swim and Vibe. Here today to introduce a new series ⁓ I am putting out called The Long Course. It will be a nine-episode series taking a look at swimming and how it's changed over the past 20 years, and unfortunately, in my humble opinion, not for the better. I will discuss kind of what it looked back in the day, what I feel it feels like and looks like now. what the difference is, and then hopefully we'll get into the reasons why, I believe, as well as some of the things that Minnesota Swim and Vibe is trying to do and is the ⁓ whole reason why Minnesota Swim and Vibe exists in the first place. Hopefully I can take you through that journey in about nine short 10 to 15 minute episodes that I will try to get done at least once a week. But anyway, welcome to the long course. Episode one is going to be called Heads Up. And I call it heads up because if you're a swimmer or a coach, ⁓ or even a parent or a fan, you will never hear a swim coach tell a swimmer that they need to lift their head up more. It's not part of the sport, it's hydrodynamics. Head down, spine to line, body position good, you'll go faster. Right? We do have to breathe. I get that. But they don't ever tell you to lift your head up more. ⁓ and I'm as a coach here today, ⁓ I'm gonna tell you the exact opposite. I'm saying. Swimmers, coaches, fans, lift your head up more. Lift your head up and look around at the sport and tell me if it's the best we can do. Because I'm gonna tell you back, and this isn't an old person rant, but we've gotten pretty far away from what the sport was when I was ⁓ an athlete. I'm gonna tell you what it was and kind of how I got there. ⁓ so I have a unique ⁓ A unique perspective. I had a fairly successful, I would say, ⁓ club, high school, and college career in the sport of swimming. ⁓ I was part of several state championship teams at Minnetonka. I was an all-American swimmer at St. Olaf, D3, Goolis, ⁓ and club with the Bach Three Flyers reunion coming this Saturday, next Saturday, this Saturday. Super excited to see all my friends. ⁓ and did pretty well there too. Maybe an age group champion and somewhere in there once or twice. ⁓ you never know. That was my career. And it stopped at the age of 21 because I was graduating college and I was ready to put my swimming life behind me, not because I necessarily was done with the sport, but there's not a lot of options for a ⁓ 22-year-old college grad to keep swimming ⁓ and find the time to do that and stay involved in the sport, at least. in my mind at the time. So I put it behind me. I was done. Done for life. Maybe I catch the Olympics every four years and and see some of the swimming there. But that's all my involvement really was. ⁓ it's which is odd because swimming kind of created a lot of the best parts of me, ⁓ in my opinion again. So what happens? We fast forward 20 years. ⁓ children of Mark decide ⁓ they want to swim. I I think that's great. I didn't push them into swimming. In fact, if they would have asked me flat out, I'd say don't do it unless you're really ⁓ up for a challenge. It's a tough and it's a demanding sport, but in the end it's all worth it because it helps you grow and the experience you get out of it is phenomenal. So they swim. ⁓ and my first couple years of their swimming was as a swim parent. ⁓ and wow. So my first couple of years of experience was as a swim parent, and that was pretty eye-opening for me, ⁓ being in the stands. And you could go back and say, Well, you weren't a parent when you swim. No, but I was in the stands a lot, all right? It wasn't too ⁓ too far away for me to reach, and was certainly in tune with the vibes going on. it was pretty stressy being up in the stands. Like there's people with their phones out constantly mashing on Meet Mobile to get updates on times. there's angry fans, elated fans. I mean, ⁓ everything was kind of focused and felt focused around the result. I'll I'll even share a couple stories that kind of ⁓ I personally that kind of lead into like this never would have happened when I swam. ⁓ first one was I was sitting at at a meet. I believe it was probably a state meet. Kids were maybe eleven, twelve, something like that. And and a parent sitting next to me was talking to their friend, and they said, I hope one of the relays in the final heat gets DQ'd. That would put our kids on the podium. I was like, Whoa, what? Take a step back. You as an adult are hoping some other kid experiences misery. So your kid can be on a podium, which they probably don't deserve because their team didn't swim fast enough, which is fine, because hey, as long as they did their best, who cares? Like this came out of somebody's mouth, and I was just like blown away. I'm like, no, who thinks like that? And it wasn't the only time I heard stuff like that. I would hear it a lot. I was part of another meet where I saw two parents get into a physical altercation over seating. Again, would never happen. Never happen in a million years when I swam. I'm like, what is all this intensity and stress going on? How can this be fun for any parent? How can it be? I don't know. So that's one thing I noticed is some the vibe of a swim parent. How all of a sudden there was so much more like emotional investment by parents in results. Coaching side, after a couple years, the club team in town needed some help coaching. I had some previous swimming experience, so I decided I I would try my hand at coaching. That was super fun. but being down on deck opened me up to a whole nother set of things. Right? Like I'm around the kids. I'm around other coaches all the time. And and here's what I felt about that. The kids were also stressed. Right? Everything was hinging on getting a good swim every single time they went up on the block. Crazy. I would hear about 12-year-olds practicing nine times a week. Crazy. ⁓ I would have coaches, which used to be like the tightest community ever. I used to love watching the coaches all goof around together at some meets. Territorial. I actually had a coach at a meet where I had four kids. And I went and I'm like, I want to sit at these bleachers. We were there first. We sat down and the coach came up to me and told me my kids can't sit there because that's where their team always sits. I have to leave. Mind blow, right? Never in a million years would I expect something like that to happen between coaches on deck. And just even the talk between coaches. These coaches don't like these coaches. These coaches don't like these officials. These officials don't like these coaches. You're hearing all this stuff. And it's not like this one happy giant community that I I was used to being a part of. on a pool deck. It was the happiest place on earth. Whether I was swimming great or not, it was still awesome. So I started thinking, what's the problem here? What am I looking at? What is what is it that I'm feeling? Am I feeling even justified? Is that just the way of the world? ⁓ and it probably is to some degree, ⁓ in all use sports, but does it mean I have to like it? And if I don't like something, doesn't mean I just sit there and do nothing about it. So follow along. where I go next is Why did I love swimming so much? What was it? And it came back to the value proposition of swimming for me as a kid. What did I have to put into it and what did I get out of it? and that typically comes down to, and not just me, my family as well, the amount of time I had to invest in it, the amount of money my family had to invest in it, and then the physical, emotional, mental energy, I'll call it PME energy. ⁓ that I put into it. That's that's the cost and what I get out of it. And what I got out of it was an amazing experience pretty much every day of my life, ⁓ at a pool where I was either challenged or learning or failing and getting back up or having fun, playing games, hanging out with friends, ⁓ just the place I always wanted to be. My parents would tell you that the worst four weeks of the year were the four weeks I didn't swim. because I didn't know what to do with myself because I love swimming that much, and that was my jam and that was my place to be. And I had a lot of people around me that felt a lot the same way. Some of them were fast, some of them were not. ⁓ but it was all cool, and we all just kind of enjoyed growing up in the sport. It was our thing, and we loved it. fast forward today, and the time different, not just in practices, right? although I think some. You know, I see kids driving an hour each way each day to go to a a specific club because that's better. rather than something locally, that's time to me. I'm not sure it's worth it. I see meets that are like four days long and last forever. I think that was another shock for me was by the last day of a weekend meet, everyone wants to go home. Parents want to go home, coaches want to go home, kids want to go home. It's like the worst atmosphere to have fun when everyone doesn't want to be there. ⁓ I didn't ever want to leave, I think. I mean occasionally I did, but most of the time I didn't want to go. If I was done swimming, I'd stick around at the end. My friends would stick around at the end. We'd just hang out. We'd be at the meet. It was fun. It's where we wanted to be. I couldn't think of a place I'd rather be. ⁓ and now we got like these masses and masses and masses of people that just want to get out of there. That's hard. Money. Twenty five bucks get you a suit and cap. ⁓ or a suit and goggles. Maybe another five bucks for a cap. ⁓ that's all it was. ⁓ now you've got kids like demanding tech suits. Multiple times a year and they cost three, four, five, six, seven hundred dollars apiece. That's expensive. So many travel meets. Where you're spending the night in a hotel, that's expensive. ⁓ so I think the time and the money both have gone up. I've talked a lot about the physical, mental, emotional energy. People are significantly more invested on the results, ⁓ which in swimming is always going to lead to heartbreak more times than not. That's part of the sport. and then what do you get out of it? ⁓ most kids aren't elite in swimming, right? That's the top two, three percent. Five percent of swimmers end up swimming in college that swam in high school or at the high school age. Five percent. College anywhere. it's crazy. So we get so hyper focused on the results, it feels like if we're not getting the results, then we're not being successful and it doesn't feel very good. It's a bad equation for me. it probably, you it didn't shift like this overnight. It it's it's a slow drift that has happened. I could probably do research to the end of time and not figure out one specific event where all of a sudden we switch gears. So that's kind of what I see, and this is why we as swimmers, we as coaches, we as parents of kids. need to lift our head up and look around and start asking some questions about why do we keep doing this way? Why do we keep drifting away from something that was once really, really good to something that I don't know if I would sign up for anymore? do I want to do it? Do what as a swimmer or as a family, would I wanna invest all this time, money, and energy into something where I'm not getting the return on? And I think we're seeing that. Participation numbers have been down. for a bit ⁓ club swimming. We see it in high school swimming. college has roster reductions and programs are being cut every year. and it's a slow death to a sport that once raised so many great people. So I'm going to talk on the next episodes ⁓ and specifically the next one. Who's the villain? Right? Who did this? The answer will be shocking, I assure you. Stay tuned. Thank you everyone. Keep your heads up.