Imagine you’re behind the block, about to start your race. Your heart’s already starting to beat faster, your arms and legs starting to shake from nerves. You hear your coaches and teammates yelling from the other side of the pool. You feel your heartbeat quicken (if that’s even possible at that point). Your breath starts to rapidly pick up and you begin to shake even more. That’s how I felt while swimming in high school.
I started swimming competitively when I was four years old. At first, my parents just signed me up for lessons so I wouldn’t drown every time I went into a pool. A few weeks into my lessons, my instructor decided I was ready to try out for the swim team. I ended up making the team!
Ever since elementary school, my life was completely absorbed by swim. Every day was another swim practice and every few weekends was a swim meet or two. I honestly enjoyed swimming back then; I really only knew how to do freestyle swimming at that point. Sure, I always worried about whether I would drop enough time or whether I would place, but it was nothing compared to being able to hear your coaches scream at you through the water. It was nothing compared to hearing “You could’ve swam faster,” after you tried so hard to do well. That’s why high school ruined swim for me.
Even though I went to two different high schools and swam for two different teams, I really only count my second high school swim team as an actual high school sports experience. My first high school didn’t really have a team, so I just swam for the club swim team in the area. After this experience, transitioning to high school swim was a complete eye-opener for me. While swimming in high school gave me some of my closest friends to this day, it is also the root of my anxiety problems. The scenario in the first paragraph of this article describes exactly how I would feel before every single event I had to swim in. And even though I would mostly feel good while in the water, it didn’t help that I could hear people screaming at me. When I got out of the water, I would feel fine at first. Then the timers would tell me my time … and my heart would break. I would start crying, sometimes feeling like I needed to puke. Even though my friends would tell me I’d done good, I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that I’d actually done horribly. I dreaded what my coaches would say, what the rest of my team would think of me. That honestly just caused more anxiety for me than I needed at that time. I felt like I needed to be as fast as Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps as a high schooler.
This was where my love for swim ended. I used to love going to the pool, attending swim meets, and seeing my friends. Now, every time I go to a pool (unless it’s for recreational reasons) I feel my chest start to close up. I feel that same sense of dread that I won’t have a good workout, even if no one is even watching. This has tremendously impacted my life, even as a college freshman who doesn’t really think about high school that often. I tried going to UREC during my first week here at JMU to swim because I heard they had a really nice pool. In the end, I couldn’t even bring myself to get into the pool that day. I also heard JMU’s Club Swim team was fun so I considered joining that, but in the end I decided against it. Thankfully, finding new activities and coping mechanisms has helped with the anxiety from swimming.
After trying to swim at UREC, I decided to try finding new activities to involve myself in. At first, I didn’t really know what to do with my life without swimming. Then I went to the JMU Student Org Night, and I’m so grateful I found Her Campus there. Even though I didn’t join every club I was interested in at that club fair, I still had a great time discovering new interests and ways to get involved. Additionally, I found that doing guided meditations helped a lot with calming my anxiety. There are apps that help with these guided meditations and relaxation, such as the Calm app. I’ve also found that a simple search for “mindfulness meditation” on YouTube will do the trick!
So, for those of you reading this article who feel like high school sport competition culture ruined your love for your favorite sport, I hope you know that you aren’t alone. It can be hard when you’re pressured to do well at every competition and expected to improve at every practice. Trust me, I know that feeling. But please know that someday it will get better. Maybe it won’t be today, maybe it won’t be tomorrow. It might not be next week, or even next month. But know that it will get better; it did for me.