I'm a hypocrite

I’m a hypocrite.  This bothers me, but I can’t help it.  It starts almost as soon as dryland is over and the kids are getting ready to swim.  For me, and for a lot of other swimmers I know, jumping in the pool has always been the hardest part of practice.  It’s cold and I think our pool is especially cold, so cold that I don’t like working out there.  As I rush them to get on their caps, goggles, line up and just GO already, I am doing my first hypocritical act of the night.  Do as I say, not as I do-- right?  This continues throughout practice….don’t talk during kick sets, breath to both sides, don’t pull on the lane lines, don’t breath in or out of your turns, finish all the way into the wall and countless other examples.  Hopefully, these hypocrisies of mine can be forgiven since they are in an effort to get these kids to practice good habits from a young age, but sometimes I do feel a little guilty.

I remember one particularly hard practice when I was a kid and it seemed like my coach was riding me a little harder than usual.  At one point, I turned to him and said, “why don’t you do it, then?”  His response was that he did do it when he was my age.  I wonder now, if he did it with the same sloppy bad habits that I had at the time and if his coach was just as hard on him and his coach before that.  Maybe each generation of coach has a little bit of hypocrite in them, but in the end, I think we are just hoping that these kids will do things a little bit better than we did.