Swimming in Obscurity: Swimmers deserve respect despite lack of spotlight

I’m a swimmer and it just seems like no one cares. We work harder than anyone, and nobody pays any attention to us. I remember my older brother used to at least get in the paper but now they don’t seem to even put in the scores of the meets. Why don’t swimmers get more respect?

 L.W., Castro Valley

There’s a lot to unpack in that short question, so let’s dive right in — so to speak.

‘We work harder than anyone.’ Do swimmers work harder than baseball and volleyball players? Maybe. But sports like wrestling, football and basketball could also make that claim. Yes, swimmers work hard, but statements like that tend to make people ignore the rest of what you have to say.

‘Now they don’t seem to even put in the scores of the meets.’ Things have changed, and part of the problem is at the newspaper end, part of the problem is at the coaches’ end, and part of the problem is with the scorekeeping.

Though some newspapers work hard to cover prep sports — we’re talking to you, Contra Costa Times and Sacramento Bee — the general malaise (SAT vocabulary alert) in the industry has led to cutbacks in personnel and pages. That means that there’s no room for even a simple summary of a meet, and the days of listing the top three finishers are a rapidly fading memory.

On the other hand, a lot of coaches no longer take newspapers themselves, and so they don’t even think about calling in the scores — and unless their athletic director makes a big deal of it, no one’s pushing them to. So one thing you can do is ask your coach if she’s calling in the results after every meet. If she isn’t, there’s your answer right there.

Finally, on this topic, scorekeeping isn’t what it used to be. Before the electronic scoreboards were installed at a lot of pools, scoring by hand was a necessity and, by necessity, people got pretty good at it. They could total everything up and even let coaches know what they needed to do in the final relay to win the meet.

Why don’t swimmers get more respect? There are a couple of reasons. First, the most important swim meets aren’t in high school, unlike football, basketball and volleyball, where high school is the most important team competition. A lot of elite swimmers don’t even bother with high school, and if they do, they usually treat it as an afterthought to their club and AAU competitions.

Also, like track, swimming just isn’t going to draw a crowd. Swim meets, by and large, are pretty boring unless you’re really paying attention (if you’re not, it’s hard to tell if your friend is in lane three or lane five), and if you don’t know what constitutes a good time for the 100 free, say, then a lot of the interesting stuff just doesn’t register.

As I’ve said before, high school sports aren’t about recognition — they’re about learning how to win and how to lose, understanding the importance of commitment and teamwork, and all those other “life lessons” coaches are always talking about. Should swimmers get more respect? Sure. But so should the best math students or trumpet players at your school, and they get even less coverage than you.  J

Clay Kallam is an assistant athletic director and girls varsity basketball coach at Bentley High in Lafayette. To submit a question for Behind the Clipboard, email Coach Kallam at clayk@fullcourt.com