STARTING YOUNG

One of the intriguing things about human beings is that we are born knowing how to swim. Place a young child in a bathtub or pool and he or she will paddle around with gusto. You won’t see an Olympic-level butterfly or backstroke, but the baby will be swimming. After about six months, the swimming reflex disappears unless it is nurtured.

In recent years programs have been established in different parts of the world to do just that nurturing. In San Diego, for instance, the late multisport coach Murray Callan taught children to swim for almost fifty years. Most of his students came to him before their third birthday.

Callan, a member of the National Swim School Association, demonstrated repeatedly that six-month-olds can easily be taught to swim. Over the years he taught thousands of children to do so. He believed that the benefits of early swimming include better motor skills and improved respiratory function. “A baby who swims early,” said Callan, “usually crawls sooner. Babies who are early swimmers also tend to be healthier babies.”

Another advantage is that the youngsters become “pool safe,” reducing the possibility of an accident. A child is considered pool safe when he or she can fall or jump in and then swim unassisted to the side of the pool. Parents should always remain vigilant, however. Never assume that your young child is completely pool safe.

Callan began by gently placing the infant in ninety-five-degree water in a face-up position. The warm water is soothing and relaxing, and the position ensures that the baby is in no danger of drinking or inhaling the water. As soon as she feels the water on her body, she responds naturally with fluid swimming motions, the back of her head and bottom bobbing on the surface.

Callan did not teach strokes to children under the age of two. Before then they squirm through the water, using one arm or two, one leg or two, eventually arriving at their destinations. “Don’t ask very young children to do anything that interferes with their fluid movements” was his advice. After the age of two he began teaching stroke technique.

Generally it takes a six-month-old baby about a year to learn to swim. One-year-old children learn in about six months. Two-year-olds take about four months, three-year-olds about three months, four-year-olds about two months, and children between five and eight only about one month. If you would like information about early childhood swimming programs in your area, contact the National Swim School Association (see Appendix F).

The Ideal Sport for Kids

Children and adolescents must get regular exercise, not only to build lean, trim, attractive bodies but also to develop strength, endurance, agility, and flexibility. As well, good exercise habits established young and nurtured through childhood last for a lifetime, providing health benefits for as long as we live. Perhaps no sport is better for accomplishing all this than swimming.

One key to reaping swimming’s benefits for children is to make it fun. There is no reason for young children to engage in heavy training. If the sport becomes drudgery, a child eventually will tire of it and want to quit, losing the pleasant associations with the sport that can provide lifelong benefits. By contrast, if swimming remains fun, children will look forward to practice, and they will be more likely to continue swimming throughout their lives. When my son was in school, I had to drag him out of the pool to get him to come home for dinner. Alexa Schuler, an eleven-year-old girl I know, can’t wait to get to her daily practice session. In fact, when she doesn’t do her chores at home or finish her homework, her parents threaten that she won’t be able to go to practice until her responsibilities are met. This always does the trick.

Health and Fitness Benefits

While an alarming and growing number of America’s youth are living a life of indolence and sloth, with calamitous consequences for their futures, many others—hundreds of thousands of youngsters across the nation—are enrolled in organized swimming programs. Their future—and their present—looks very different indeed. A study published in 1991 showed, not surprisingly, that these swimmers are likely to be quite a bit leaner, stronger, and healthier than nonswimmers. They are also less likely to become sick and when they do get sick to recover faster.

Academic Success

There is more: despite devoting an average of five to ten hours per week to working out, youthful swimmers tend to do much better than their peers in their schoolwork.

These results come as no surprise to those of us who have been around the sport for many years. Each issue of Swimming World magazine contains short feature articles on four or five youngsters who have achieved outstanding success in swimming for their ages. Almost without exception, these boys and girls between ten and sixteen are also honor students and active in both other sports and other extracurricular activities. In fact, it is almost expected that young swimmers will also be outstanding students. This admirable behavior pattern continues through college. In almost every college in the country, members of the swim team have higher graduation rates and higher grade-point averages than other athletes and nonathletes, despite the extra hours they spend in training.

My son, Russell, is a good example of this phenomenon. He began swimming at age seven and continued through college. During that time he also excelled in a variety of other sports, especially gymnastics (in which he also competed in college) but also judo, track and field, volleyball, and basketball. He began taking guitar lessons at the same time he started swimming, and now he composes and performs his own music. Throughout his school career he was an outstanding student, especially in his final three years in college. During that time, he also managed to earn his pilot’s license.

One of the happy side effects of swimming is that it teaches self-discipline. Nowadays few other activities do. Few children will grow up to become Olympic champions, but they all can grow up to be winners in the much more important game of life. Besides its many health benefits, swimming teaches its young practitioners important lessons in managing a busy schedule. It also inculcates a sense of responsibility, commitment, and organization that lasts a lifetime.

Few Injuries

Some other sports may confer some of these advantages on young athletes, but swimming has that additional major advantage that will appeal to parents: it is almost injury free. Although an increasing number of American youth are remaining sedentary, the minority that do exercise are becoming more prone to injury. According to orthopedists and pediatricians across the nation, sports-related injuries are cropping up with alarming frequency in children. These injuries usually are caused by overuse, improper technique, poor equipment, and the inability of immature bones, tendons, and joints to handle the stress being placed on them by heavy athletic training and competition.

Such injuries usually respond well to rest, but if ignored they can result in major and at times permanent problems. According to Dr. Barry Goldberg, director of sports medicine at Yale University Health Services, “If kids are caught up in a situation where there is pressure to play through the pain or tough it out, these injuries tend to progress to chronic injury and sometimes lifelong disability, which is really a crime.”

Because it takes place in water, a much less stressful environment, swimming results in relatively few children’s injuries.

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TYPICAL CHILDREN’S SPORTS INJURIES

Baseball: Little League elbow (inflammation where tendon and bone meet at inner elbow); tendinitis and bursitis of shoulder.

Basketball: Schlatter’s disease (knee pain resulting from inflammation).

Football: Head injuries, spinal injuries.

Gymnastics: Stress fractures of lower spine and forearms.

Running: Stress fracture of the shinbone, Sever’s disease (inflammation where the Achilles tendon attaches to the foot, showing up as heel pain).

Soccer: Sever’s disease (see above).
Tennis: Tendinitis (inflammation of tendons) of shoulder and elbow (“tennis elbow”).
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Age-Group Swimming

Perhaps the most successful sports program for kids is the U.S. national age-group swimming program. There is nothing quite like it in any other sport. Presently more than 220,000 youngsters between the ages of eight and eighteen are enrolled in the United States Swimming (USS) program. Several hundred thousand other kids are involved in similar, less competitive programs in YMCAs, boys’ and girls’ clubs, Jewish community centers, and country clubs. It is very much because of these programs that the United States has dominated swimming at the international level since the late 1950s, although many other countries are now establishing similar programs.

How the Program Works

There are USS age-group programs in every state of the Union, plus Puerto Rico and Guam. Canada has a similar program. In age-group swimming, boys and girls train together but compete separately. Children are divided into five age-groups: ten and under, eleven and twelve, thirteen and fourteen, fifteen and sixteen, and seventeen and eighteen. Most areas have an eight and under age-group as well, but USS has wisely decided not to make this age-group an official category. Swimmers are rated by their ability in each event, according to national time standards. These standards are C, B, A, AA, AAA, and AAAA. Swimmers even at the B level are impressive athletes. Kids who are A swimmers or better are simply awesome.

U.S. Swimming compiles a list each year of the top sixteen swimmers nationally in each event and age-group. Perusing past lists of top-sixteen swimmers is like reading a who’s who of later world and Olympic champions: Janet Evans, Summer Sanders, Tracy Caulkins, Jenny Thompson, Pablo Morales, Mark Spitz, and so on. The program also publishes the national records for every event and age-group. The records as of 1994 appear in Appendix E.

At the local level, meets group swimmers according to ability: B swimmers swim in B meets, A swimmers in A meets, and so on. Once a swimmer has achieved a new time standard, she can no longer compete against lower-rated children (until she moves up to the next age-group). Thus, kids are always competing against their peers in terms of sex, age, and ability.

The top swimmers in each region compete twice yearly in regional championships. Those meeting even tougher national standards can go on to the junior national championships. The cream of the older swimmers, those who meet still tougher standards, can then compete at the senior national championships. (If you would like information about age-group swimming programs in your area, you can contact United States Swimming, Inc. The address and phone number are listed in Appendix F.)

The Birth of Age-Group Swimming

The national age-group program, arguably the most valuable legacy in the history of youth sports, formally began in 1951, but its roots extend back several decades. In 1913 Carl Bauer arrived in the United States from Germany with credentials to spare. As a young man he had distinguished himself in swimming, water polo, soccer, gymnastics, and rowing. All these talents he carried on a six-foot, 190-pound frame, which he kept fit by swimming every day.

After beginning his work in Chicago, he moved to St. Louis in 1917 to become swim coach of the Missouri Athletic Club (MAC), remaining there until his retirement fifty years later. It was at the MAC that Bauer devised an age-group training regimen for the boys’ team in 1918. He was convinced that there was a correlation between age and ability; unfortunately, in the 1920s the top officials of the Amateur Athletic Union weren’t buying the idea. By the late 1940s, Bauer had become one of the most successful coaches in the land, guiding his team to several national championships, and soon many in swimming started to listen to his ideas more closely.

Beth Kaufman, a swimming mom and Marin County (California) Red Cross water safety chairman, was one of them. In 1950 she convinced AAU officials that a test of Bauer’s age-group idea was in order. The following January the first age-group meet was held. The entry fee was twenty-five cents. The meet proved such a success that the program went national the following year. Kaufman, who came to be known as the mother of age-group swimming, became its first chairman, remaining in the position for the next ten years. As an age-grouper myself in California, I remember her well as a thoughtful, enthusiastic, maternal presence at many of the major meets.

Under Kaufman’s guidance, the program proved a phenomenal success. She demonstrated conclusively what she had always suspected—that with training and competition geared to age, kids would progress at a more reasonable pace and perform longer in the sport.

It did not take long for results to pour in. In the 1955 Pan-American Games, Mary Lou Elsenius became the first age-group swimmer to win an international gold medal. In 1960 age-group alumna Chris von Saltza was the top medal winner of the Rome Olympics, winning three gold medals and one silver. By 1964 every single member of the U.S. Olympic team was an age-group alumnus, and the United States had thrown down an aquatic gauntlet for the rest of the world.