Falling in Love with Swimming Again – From the Outside
There comes a point for many swimmers when the love story with the sport changes.
For some, it happens after retirement. For others, it begins during college, after years of chasing times, standards, and expectations. The black line that once felt like home slowly becomes something associated with pressure, exhaustion, or even loss. You still respect the sport, but the feeling that made you fall in love with it in the first place seems farther away than you ever imagined.
Swimming shaped my childhood, my identity, and my future. It taught me discipline before I understood the word. It introduced me to lifelong friends and unforgettable moments. It opened doors that carried me through college and into a career connected to the sport. However, somewhere along the way, swimming became something I felt I had survived instead of something I missed.
After my competitive career ended, I stayed close to the sport, but my relationship with it was different. I watched meets without feeling the same excitement. I talked about swimming without feeling connected to it. I wondered if the chapter that had defined so much of my life had simply come to an end. It felt as though part of me was gone.
The funny thing about falling back in love with something is that you rarely notice it while it’s happening.
It wasn’t one defining moment. There wasn’t a race that changed everything or a conversation that suddenly shifted my perspective. Instead, it happened quietly as I spent more time on pool decks, no longer seeing the sport through the eyes of a competitor, but through the people around me.
I noticed coaches celebrating a swimmer’s first cut with the same excitement as if they had won an Olympic medal. I watched teammates explode with joy after someone touched the wall and looked up to see a lifetime best. I saw young swimmers beam with pride after learning a new skill that so many of us eventually took for granted.
None of those moments were about me but they reminded me why I fell in love with swimming in the first place.
Working in swimming has given me the opportunity to experience the sport from the other side of the lane line. As an athlete, my world revolved around races and goals. That is the nature of competition. You become so focused on your own journey that it is easy to miss everything happening around you.
Coming back years later, I started noticing the little things.
The coach running down the pool deck to hug an athlete who had finally achieved a qualifying time after years of trying. The eight-year-old who couldn’t wait to tell everyone they had dropped two seconds. The teammates cheering louder for someone else’s race than their own. The swimmer who climbed out of the pool feeling disappointed, only to have a coach remind them that progress is not always measured by the clock.
For a long time, I thought what I missed was competing.
It wasn’t.
What I had missed was being surrounded by people who care so deeply about something bigger than themselves.
Swimming has a way of creating a community unlike any other. Coaches dedicate years to helping young people become better athletes and even better humans. Parents willingly spend weekends in humid facilities because they believe in their children. Volunteers arrive before sunrise and stay long after the final event because they believe these moments matter.
It is easy to think swimming is about the times on the scoreboard, but the water is deeper than that.
That community celebrates every milestone, whether it is an Olympic medal, a first state cut, or simply finishing a race that once seemed impossible. It reminds athletes that their worth extends far beyond a stopwatch. It teaches resilience, humility, discipline, and how to celebrate someone else’s success as if it were your own.
Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that.
Working in the sport again gave me the chance to see it through fresh eyes. Not as the swimmer who carried the weight of expectations, but as someone standing on the outside, watching hundreds of people choose to pour their hearts into one another every single day.
That is what made me fall in love with swimming again.
Not the racing.
Not the medals.
Not even the pursuit of faster times.
It was the people.
And maybe that was what I had loved all along.