Nowadays, it appears as if school football and basketball are given all of the attention.  It’s as if it passes the minds of most that these are not the only sports requiring hard work and effort.  The school swim team dedicates much of their time to improving their swimming abilities, yet this fact is often overshadowed by the successes of the teams of other sports.

Now do not get me wrong, I know football and basketball are both arduous activities that require unparalleled focus and determination from their participants.  However, other sports, particularly swimming, require similar if not equal amounts of effort to succeed.  I was on the swim team earlier this year for just a few weeks, and although the sport was not my cup of tea, I could tell that much effort had to be put in by other swimmers.  By the end of most practices, even the most experienced on the team were left out of breath.  Although someone may try to counter this by theorizing that the swimmers are less athletic, this is simply not true.  Swimming itself is an athletic activity, and requires some form of athleticism from its participants; be it via technique or raw strength, one has to be athletic to swim competitively.

In fact, swimming has much more to it than meets the eye.  Most believe that swimming requires little effort; it’s just swimming, right?  And that’s where they are wrong.  Swimming is one of the greatest activities for burning calories.  In the world of swimming, raw strength only takes you so far.  Swimming requires hitherto unknown amounts of technical movements all throughout the body in order to win that gold medal.  Years of practice are needed in order to master the arm, leg and head movements that propel one forward to the finish line, or in this case, the edge of the pool.  Although these improvements in technique may only be able to shave off tenths of a second, a tenth of a second less may be considered monumental to some.  This is due to the fact that reducing records in swimming requires much more effort than reducing times in sports such as track and field because of the density of the water.  Water is more dense than air; therefore, water is harder to push through than air.  Again, I do know that sports such as track and field require great amounts of effort; it just appears to me that swimming, which requires much effort also, is given less attention despite its difficulty.

Swimming as a sport demands the physical and mental awareness of the individual.  Despite this, it is not given the attention that other sports receive even though it asks for as much as other sports do.  This should be changed so that hard working swimmers receive the recognition they deserve.

The article below was used in researching this column:

Krishnan, Shweta. “What Makes Swimming One of the Most Challenging Sports.” Swimming World News, 7 July 2021, https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/what-makes-swimming-one-of-the-most-challenging-sports/.