by Deborah Nies

Created on: July 10, 2009

Being Olympian

Raising a confident child means that sometimes you need to allow them to fail. Playing sports can teach good sportsmanship and develop self-confidence.

My daughter has been a member of a swim team for 15 months. She is a good swimmer, but at her current rate, she will never be Dara Torres. But even though she will (probably) not be an Olympic swimmer, I care deeply about the life lessons that she is learning from being on a swim team.

While swimming is mostly an individual sport, she is also learning what it means to be on a team. At a swim meet held recently, I watched her pump up the members of her 200 Freestyle Relay team, and it made me smile. At 10 years old, she was the oldest in the foursome. One girl was swimming in her first meet and was very nervous. Hannah offered her advice, and said, "It'll be fine...You'll be great." My daughter may not be the fastest swimmer, but she is a kind-hearted, nurturer to her teammates. She may not always contribute points to the team's cumulative total points, but she definitely adds to the group's bottom line.

Her coach, Matt Wunderlin, recently told his swimmers the following about swimming:

"It's not about being an Olympian. It's about being Olympian. Learning to be a hero. And, it is not comfortable to be a hero. If it were, being one wouldn't be so great."

Trying things that you haven't attempted before, losing the safety net, and stretching yourself beyond your self-imposed limits, now that is heroic. I explain to my daughter when she laments that she doesn't swim faster or that she DQs sometimes, she does heroic things everyday. Going to swim practice three or more times a week, when you'd rather be vegging with a good book, is heroic. Cheering on your teammates in a race is heroic. Giving kind words to struggling swimmers is heroic.

As parents, and as coaches, we need to teach our children how to be heroes in their daily lives.
The following story now embarrasses me, but I tell it with the hopes that another parent might learn a valuable lesson from it.

When my daughter was a 2nd grader, she joined a competitive soccer team. This was her (our) first venture into the sports world. Many of her teammates were also new to soccer, so we weren't expecting to win the Waunakee World Cup.

At this age-level, the soccer players don't understand the concept of "playing a position" on the field. Constantly, it looked like a group of swarming bumblebees with all ten players hovering around the soccer

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