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Inner City Swimming:
A coach's perspective |
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Almost every time I ride on an elevator someone will ask me "What team do you play for?" My reply has always been "I am a swimmer." Then, with a look of complete unbelief that person will ask, "My God why don't you play basketball?" This is just one example of what happens when people assume that all young people with considerable height are basketball players. Everyday in the inner city there is a kid who chooses basketball, football and baseball because it is the expected thing to do.
What does it take for an inner city or minority youth to choose swimming over these other socially expected sports?
I once believed that access to swimming facilities and equipment was what kept the average inner city kid from swimming; however now I believe that there are other issues. When I think back to when I was eight years old I often wonder what it was that steered me towards the water and I realize now that the major reason I became a swimmer was because of a charismatic lifeguard turned swim coach, Charles Canady.
I met Coach Charles, a big man with an even bigger smile, at one of Atlanta's most notorious housing projects - Perry Homes. My mother, Jessica, worked at the project's pool and I would go there after school and splash around in the pool. Charles taught me the formal swimming strokes after he recognized that I wasn't comfortable in the water. He told me that I would have learn to swim correctly because one day I might need to save someone from drowning - myself. Soon after I learned all the strokes, I started swimming on the newly formed Perry Homes Diplomats swimming team with the Bashirs, a huge family of swimmers and Coach Charles.
Coach Charles along with Askia Bashir introduced us all to swimming and made swimming something we liked doing. He would use every incentive he could think of to motivate us. Everything from "all you can eat buffets" to candy, to monetary prizes were offered to us as a way to get us excited about swimming. Coach Charles would relate swimming to us in such a way that we couldn't help but get excited about competing and winning. He helped us city kids to understand that swimming was a sport that we could excel in and gain recognition. "Not everyone needs to play basketball" he would always say.
Coach Charles was forced to get our parents excited about swimming as well because, as he puts it "they are the hardest to teach." He says that in order to get swimmers to commit to swimming you have to get the parents to adapt to the culture of the sport. Our parents did not understand that we needed to swim 5 days a week to improve and be competitive. Coach Charles had to make our parents comfortable with the pool and competitive swimming environment. As he put it, "Most parents will sit in football bleachers in the pouring rain to watch their kids compete but won't sit down and wait for their kids swimming heat if it comes after the 400 free."
Coach Charles did a great deal to help translate the sport to our parents and once our parents understood swimming he was able to introduce us to the various levels of training necessary to develop us into competitors. Coach Charles is an excellent developmental coach because he understands that new swimmers need motivation because there are so many sports from which to choose. Soccer, tennis and golf are new sports that are accessible to greater numbers of minority children and a coach "has to work harder nowadays to get children to commit."
There are many factors that eventually lead to every athlete's choice of sports. One factor that we mustn't overlook is the importance of the instructors and coaches that play a vital role developing our swimmers.
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