Community Update

Swimming

By: Jack Decker

Swimming is a fun but challenging sport to be in. In swimming, people have to know how to dive, swim all four strokes, flip-turn, open turn, and know how to read the clock correctly.

Swimming is hard to play because you have to learn all of the strokes properly. There are four strokes in swimming, butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. If swimmers ever do an IM event they have to remember the order of these strokes. That order is butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. The strokes breaststroke and freestyle are the easiest to learn properly. The hardest stroke is butterfly because it’s very tiring. The last stroke is an okay stroke to learn and that’s backstroke.

It is also hard to play because diving properly is very hard to do. Diving is difficult because you have to have proper head positioning on the blocks so your goggles don’t fall off, (trust me you don’t want to swim with no goggles). Also, you have to learn how to do a proper backstroke “dive”. The final reason that diving is hard to do is because you have to enter the water at a certain angle so you don’t hurt yourself.

Lastly, reading the clock is difficult because you have to be good at math. The clock is hard to read because if you are second you have to subtract 5 seconds from your final time, 10 seconds if you’re third and so on. You have to remember when you left and subtract that time from the time you get to get your final time. Also, you have to make a certain interval and that can be confusing. Lastly, the clock isn’t visible and that can be a very big problem.

Swimming is a sport that can be fun, only if you work. Learning how to do all of these things makes this sport unique and difficult.