Yes. Being a “big” girl can be brutal. My “little” sister is 6’2. I remember how much she struggled in high school.


Another quick story:

When my Emma was in preschool, she was being teased about her size by a boy in her class. I told her to tell him if he kept it up I was going to toss him off the building

Fast forward a little and I’m in car pool line, and the director comes up says there was a small “incident” where Emma told a classmate I was going to throw him off the building, and why was that and what should we do?

I responded: “she told him that because I’m going to toss him off the building if he keeps teasing her”

He had no idea how to reply, so I continued:

“Don’t worry, it’s only one story, it probably won’t kill him”

This flummoxed him even more

(Did I mention this was a Catholic Montessori preschool?)


As I pulled forward I finished with:

“We love it here. But if you don’t handle the bullying, I will”



Anyone want to guess how many more issues we had?

yes!!!! This made me happy!

That’s awesome, great to hear success! Bet you were busting with pride, I would have been! Give her a kudos from me! Good job!

Now that's a great weekend. I grinned ear to ear on the outcome.

We need more young people like her. Congratulations.

She will always be known as the girl that stepped up to the plate and said "Yes, I can do that", and so she did and did it well!! Thanks for sharing.

quote:

Originally posted by Kevbo:
My youngest child is a 10 year old girl.

Against the 11-12 year old boys

AND SHE SMOKED THE FIELD

eat that, “Lia” Thomas

The icing on the cake was hearing a dad bitch about how his 12 year old son didn’t get a heat ribbon because he lost to my 10 year old daughter. Here’s an idea, swim faster

......................................................

Congratulations to your daughter.

.

As a father of daughters this made my day!

Kevbo, you're my hero.

And props to your daughter.

quote:

Originally posted by Kevbo:
I’d have to check for sure but I know her 50 meter backstroke and freestyle are just over the 30 second mark. I think she is almost as fast in the backstroke as she is with the crawl.

If there’s a turn in the 50, it’s short course and probably yards. No turn is long course and meters. Right now is long course season. The 10 and under women’s national record for the LCM 50 backstroke is 32.18.

Height is a great benefit in swimming. Hopefully, she sticks with it.

I love that your daughter smoked the competition. That’s awesome. Congratulations to her.

I think it’s pretty great how you handled the bully situation. Epic.

Excellent story.

There is a turn. But they list the events as “50m” which I thought meant meters, but maybe not? I swear when they announce the events they even say “event XX girl’s 10 and under 50 meter back stroke”. But I guess that could just be verbiage. I swim a mile and a half every day at the pool where she practices in the winter, and I do know the lane length there is in yards. 36 laps is a mile.

And my wife tells me her fastest time in the backstroke is right around 37 seconds.

Can you tell I did all the “ball” sports with our sons while my wife was at the swim meets?

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:

quote:

Originally posted by Kevbo:
I’d have to check for sure but I know her 50 meter backstroke and freestyle are just over the 30 second mark. I think she is almost as fast in the backstroke as she is with the crawl.

If there’s a turn in the 50, it’s short course and probably yards. No turn is long course and meters. Right now is long course season. The 10 and under women’s national record for the LCM 50 backstroke is 32.18.

Height is a great benefit in swimming. Hopefully, she sticks with it.

That would be short course meters (SCM) then. I said probably yards because 25 meter pools are not common in the US. High school and college meets are SCY and USA swimming keeps track of records for SCY and LCM. A lot of pools are 25 yards x 50 meters so they can be reconfigured by running the lane lines one way or the other.

For reference: the qualifying times for the Virginia Swimming Age Group Championships for the 10 and under 50 Back are: LCM - 41.49, SCM - 40.89, SCY - 36.68. The 11-12 qualifying times for the same event are: LCM - 36.19, SCM - 35.59, SCY - 32.09. As long a swimmer has time better than one of those times they can swim at that meet, so your daughter gets to go to the good meet.

Great stories BTW.

Drive on, Ariel

Congratulations!

If she continues to grow tall and swim, middle and long distance may become her thing. Being much taller for a female swimmer can limit those flip turn times on short/sprint distances.

My daughter was a swimmer, set state highs school records, competed in US Olympic trials, National Championships, SEC, and D1 National Championships.

When she got out of the pool at the 2016 D1 Nationals (they were at Georgia Tech that year) after her last swim, she said "I am no longer a swimmer, I am a swammer."

She is almost 6'3".

This message has been edited. Last edited by: SW_Sig,

I don't know how the problem came about and I started to think the 12 year old boy not getting a medal was unfair until I figured 10 year old girl versus 12 year old boy is fair.

Pretty impressive actually.

^^^I volunteer to time at a lot of meets, so I’ll speculate as to what happened. The individual swimmer is supposed to keep track of which events they are swimming in as well as which heat in that event and which lane in that heat. The coaches do their best, but they have dozens of swimmers to coach. They try to talk to each swimmer before and after each swim to do that coaching stuff and don’t want to use that valuable time holding hands. You’ll see a lot of swimmers with charts written on their arms or legs to help them remember what they are supposed to be doing. Even then, the swimmer has to pay attention to the scoreboard and listen to the announcements (many with PA systems worse than the local drive thru) to keep track of what’s going on.

For example, a swimmer might be in lane 3 of heat 5 in event 14. The swimmer will get in line in the appropriate lane before their particular event and heat. Each heat runs like clock work. For starts off the block, freestyle, breast and fly, the previous heat’s swimmers don’t exit the pool until the next heat starts. The swimmers in the next heat literally dive in over the swimmers from the previous heat. For backstroke, the previous swimmers have to exit the pool before the next heat can start because the swimmers hang onto bars on the blocks in the pool at the start.

This happens to keep things moving. The last meet I timed had 700 individual swimmers, most who swim 3-4 events. The meet would be many hours longer if you had to wait for swimmers to walk up before each heat. It actually did when COVID rules were in place.

10 and under swimmers are a bit like herding cats. As timers, we have sheets that list the name of the swimmer and we ask each swimmer what their name is to verify they are in the right place at the right time. With 8 lanes, there’ll be 40 kids chatting with each other and being kids. They aren’t always where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be. That’s what happened with Kevbo’s daughter. It happens. Especially for the younger swimmers, the officials will try to find an open lane so the swimmer can get a time. In this case, there was an open lane in the 11-12 boys so they had Kevbo’s daughter swim there. Her time will be counted with the 10 and under girls at the end of the meet, but she gets the ribbon in her for winning the heat. Likely, the boy’s dad didn’t realize the 5’7” girl was only 10 years old hence the butt hurt. He probably thought she was 13-14.

For reference, on my son’s high school team the girls average 5’7”. The women Olympic finalists average 5’9”.

I would have made sure to mention that his boy was beat by a 10 year old girl. I do it with my own son as it motivates him to swim faster.

Sorry for the long post. I’m sitting at the closest pool to our house in MI (60 miles) watching my son practice. I’m thinking about all the years of “fun” Kevbo and his wife will be having if their daughter sticks with swimming. The moments are short, but they make it all worthwhile.

I took my two "tweenage" granddaughters to a college volleyball camp recently. The 5th grader is taller than the sixth grader and getting a little embarrassed by her height. I wanted the girls to see the volleyball players as role models, and they were great - positive and encouraging. Most of the college girls were over six feet tall -- I am 6'4" and the player handing out the t-shirts was as tall as me. There are lots of lovely and talented tall girls these days.

Thanks for all the support guys! Apparently what happened is a swimmer that was supposed to swim in the Lane my daughter was in was supposed to swim in one of the heats before my daughter, and didn’t. So she swam in the next heat. Which cascaded into my daughter standing there with their event over, and apparently the timer didn’t realize the mistake until it was said and done

She was supposed to go to a big meet in Florida last year and we didn’t go…I don’t remember what happened. Honestly it was probably because of something from one of her older siblings. My oldest son was a redshirt freshman on the university of florda basketball team last year, and my middle son is a soccer player that has been invited to play academy soccer in England, so to say that I’m running around like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest is an understatement

Now that number 1 is off, we get to focus more in number 3. I know she is swimming junior Olympics this fall. 2.5 hour swim practice will be fun fun. Fortunately for me my primary form of exercise is swimming. I never did swim team (played football in college) but growing up in Hawaii it was just what you did. I still swim at least a mile daily. I am very fortunate to live less than a mile from our aquatic center, and I’ve got a nice pool in the back


As a complete aside……I took a hiatus from here for a year or so. Needed a break from all forms of social media. Killed my fakebook account etc, I really do appreciate the positive praise and help from you guys. And so does Emma.

Love it. I just got home walked in the house oldest daughter (17) in the shower jamming OLD school Metallica. Proud papa. She hates the new music.