About 2 years ago, my family had a dilemma. We were struggling to find something "athletic" for our daughter to do. See, her brother has always been a natural athlete. He played, at one time, baseball, soccer, basketball and football. He just trasitioned from one to the other with no problems. our daughter, on the other hand, really struggled with finding a sport. Now, when I say sport, I use that term loosely. We tried soccer (she HATED it), t-ball (didn't care at all), basketball (tough for a girl to stay focused at her age) and, yes, even cheerleading. Now, to me, cheering doesn't count as a sport (bring it on) but it was something mildly active where she got out of the house and did something with other people. She eventually grew tired of it, and we certainly didn't want to deal with the politics of cheerleading for the rest of her life. So, we thought we were out of options.
Until we found swimming. We found out there was a small group of swimmers that meets at the high school near our house, and we thought that would be great. Her grandmother was a swimmer, and I was always in the pool growing up, so it seemed like a natural fit. So, we signed her up.
Let's just say she took to the water like...well, a fish to water. She loved it. She enjoyed the people, the swimming, the exercise, pretty much everything about it. So, we were loving it...and she started doing meets. We didn't know what to expect with the meets...they can be overwhelming at first, but we stuck it out. She would swim her three or four events and we would go home. Her favorite part about swim meets was going to Subway afterwards, which is our "tradition".
Then she started winning...a lot. I won't say that she was destroying the field, but she was placing in 75% of her events. And it happened again...and again. All of the sudden, I am going from "hey, this is a neat hobby" to "she might actually be good at this"!
Her last meet, which is called a "CHAMPS" meet (think of sort of a district meet), was a few weeks ago. She was competing against some of her strongest competition ever. There were a million kids there, and it was crazy. You may recall my previous post about it. Anyway, she did great. She won a few of her heats (which is all we ever ask her to do) and we left, knowing that it was a good meet (and yes, we went straight to Subway).
Well, we found out yesterday that she kicked some serious butt. A first, a fourth, and a fifth place in her division. So, needless to say that I am extremely proud of her. Hopefully, she will continue with this attitude and enjoy herself at the same time. My only goal is to prevent her from burning out on it (which will be tough as she practices 4 nights a week).
1 comment:
Great job!
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