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It’s a bit ironic that a sport based on the gold standards of Olympic status, and to a lesser extent, college scholarships, sustains itself by abiding by neither. It can’t. No sport can.

by Tom Slear

Four years ago, Scott Armstrong had an opportunity for a swimming scholarship at an NCAA Division I university, yet he chose to attend Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, where the tuition bill could fund a private navy, and as a Division III school, there is no athletic aid for swimmers.

Once at Hopkins, Armstrong left what many would consider a path littered with frustration – four trips to the NCAA Division III nationals, 11 second-place finishes. Not a single title.

But spare the pity. Armstrong has no regrets. Quite the opposite, in fact. He improved each of his four years at Hopkins. In the meantime, he uncovered the reasons that allow him to say unabashedly that he “loved” competitive swimming. For one, he relished the hard work.

“I enjoyed working out to the point of exhaustion,” he says. “There is no better feeling after a workout when the only thing you want to do is lie down and veg out.”

Armstrong pauses, waiting for the rhetorical question, “Are you crazy?” When it doesn’t come, he continues.

“It’s been 18 years of swimming, and I think it’s mostly about accepting a challenge. A lot of swimmers don’t want to deal with the nervousness of competition or the fear of not doing their best times, and they quit. That’s a huge mistake. They miss the opportunity to stand up to their fears.”

Sports psychologists couldn’t say it any better. The explosion in youth sports over the last 30 years has given impetus to a cottage industry that studies the motivation behind the participants. Armstrong is instructive not so much for what says but for what he doesn’t. His lengthy and enjoyable swimming career had nothing to do with the tangible milestones of success so often attached to competitive athletics by parents, coaches and the media, such as setting records and achieving national and even Olympic status. Armstrong’s success came on his terms. He met goals that he defined, factors that he could control. The outcome was an experience he cherishes.

It’s a bit ironic that a sport based on the gold standards of Olympic status, and to a lesser extent, college scholarships, sustains itself by abiding by neither. It can’t. No sport can.

“The research is pretty clear,” says Dave Feigley, Ph.D., chairman of the Department of Exercise Science and Sports Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “People stay with a sport because of their friends and a perception of competency. If the sport gives the athlete a feeling that he is accomplishing something, that he is improving, that he is good at what he does, then he will tend to stay.”

Feigley emphasizes that the operative word is perception. A college scholarship can be a worthy goal, but only if the swimmer perceives it as an affirmation of competency.

“It has to stay as an internal goal,” says Feigley. “If it becomes an external goal – I have to earn a scholarship so I can go to school – it will be perceived as controlling. Then you have to get that scholarship, and in order to get it, you must swim. That brings on a feeling of being trapped, which really de-motivates athletes.”

 Feigley isn’t suggesting that athletes dismiss all external goals. Rather, he thinks they should build them around internal goals. Winning a race for example, is a laudable external goal, but it must be tempered by the internal goal of swimming well, which for most swimmers translates into doing a best time.

Marty Ewing, Ph.D., director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, has found that children stay with sports because they want to have fun, though parents and coaches often misinterpret that term. Fun from a child’s perspective, at least as it relates to organized sports, is not the frivolous play they initiate during recess. Instead, it’s a steady progression toward competency.

Eight-year-old tennis players, Ewing found, determine fun to mean simply hitting the ball. Nine-year-olds expand the definition to include hitting the ball harder and placing it more accurately. Eleven-year-olds want to test their abilities, but only against other players of roughly the same skill level. Twelve-year-olds want to experiment with competing at higher levels.

Only when they enter the teenage years does winning become an important part of the fun they are seeking. These early teen years are also the time when most boys and girls drop out of organized sports. The two are not related, however. According to Ewing, teenagers don’t leave sports because they can’t reconcile their increased need to win with the inevitable defeats. Winning is important only in that it affirms development. Losing can be dealt with if there is still a perception of improvement. They leave because other expectations within their definition of fun are not being met, such as a positive atmosphere promoted by the coach, or enjoyable experiences with their teammates.

(Another major reason, Ewing found, had to do with decreased opportunity. If a freshman in high school gets cut from the junior varsity soccer team, he usually has no other option to play. This is rarely the case for swimmers, who face few barriers to entry until, perhaps, college.)

The athletes themselves intuitively come to understand all of this as they mature, regardless of outside influences. As Ewing says, “The kids are much more realistic than their parents about understanding where they are as athletes and what the sport does for them.” They like to win, but they begin to realize that a compelling desire to win means giving up control because they have little say over the quality of the other swimmers in the race. What they can control is how well they swim.

This aligns with a recent study conducted by USA Swimming titled, Coaching “Fun” With Age Groupers. Seven- to 10-year olds listed medals, winning races and pleasing others as some of the factors that most contributed to their enjoyment of swimming. Fifteen- to 19-year olds listed hard work and dry-land training.

“As the athlete ages,” the report hypothesized, “he/she needs fewer and fewer external sources of fun as training/swimming becomes enjoyable in itself and they develop a clear purpose for their training.”

Put another way: What sustains swimmers through their early years doesn’t keep them going as senior swimmers. Staying with competitive swimming over the long haul means finding emotional nourishment almost exclusively from internal goals, goals which have little to do with winning races, setting records or earning college scholarships. This applies as much to a relay swimmer at a Division III college as it does to an elite international swimmer.  

“It’s important in swimming that you find a way to measure success that has nothing to do with touching the wall first or breaking records,” says Jeff Rouse, a former world record holder in the 100m backstroke and a 1996 Olympic gold medalist. “At about 13 or 14, you start to become aware of competition and winning. It’s easy to get caught up in things like earning a college scholarship. It’s much harder to find out what it is about swimming that you really like and keep that in mind.”

Rouse ignored his own advice in the years leading up to the 1992 Olympics. He set the world record in the 100m backstroke a year earlier. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, he came to view an Olympic gold medal as the only fitting conclusion to his competitive swimming career.

The notion was absurd, of course, but Rouse bought into it, picturing himself as a failure if he didn’t win. What played out was a textbook case of the danger of relying on external motivation. In the Olympic final, Canadian Mark Tewksbury swam the race of his life, improving his best time by over a second and out-touching Rouse for the gold medal by six-hundredths of a second. Rouse defined success based on factors he couldn’t control. No one, other than perhaps Tewksbury himself, thought he would swim that well.

The loss prompted Rouse to commit to four more years of training back when income for post-collegiate swimmers was tenuous. (Rouse graduated from Stanford in 1992). This time around, however, his motivation was different.

 “I was able to tell myself that winning wasn’t the most important thing,” he says. “Basically, I gave myself permission to lose, which, in effect, gave me a lot of freedom to win the race.”

In Atlanta in 1996, Rouse worried strictly about his own race. He strove for “easy speed,” that state where fast swimming seems effortless. Achieve that, he reasoned, and winning would take care of itself. In the final of the 100m backstroke, Rouse bolted to the lead off the blocks and was never challenged.

Now, at the age of 33, Rouse is training once again in the hope of making the 2004 Olympic team. The decision to return to competition after six years out of the water went through several steps, beginning with wondering if he could return to his old form and whether that would be good enough to make the Olympic team. In the end, he became as excited about the process as much as the result. Though the goal for public consumption is a spot on next summer’s Olympic team, the primary goal is internal.

“I want my perfect race as defined by me,” he says. “The cool thing about that is, I could actually have a successful race by my measurement and not make the Olympic team. I would walk away knowing that I did what I wanted to do.”  

Enjoying success by focusing on everything but winning certainly turns the notion of competitive swimming on its head. Here again, the irony is apparent. The sport of swimming might be based on winning, yet it seems that continued participation in swimming is based on everything but. The contradiction leaves many swimmers at loss to explain their motivation. Their drive equates to electricity. They know it when they touch it, but they are at a loss to define it.

"It’s hard for me to put into words, other than to say that I love swimming,” says Beth Botsford, who won an Olympic gold medal in the 100m backstroke in Atlanta and hasn’t approached that level of success since. “I’ve had a lot of downs, but I never really thought about quitting. It goes back to why I started swimming in the first place. I don’ t know how to say it any other way. I really love swimming – the people I’ve met, the training, the competition. Swimming has become a part of me.”

Botsford cuts off any discussion about the nuances of internal and external motivation. To her it’s all quite simple. Ask yourself: Do you like to compete? Do you like to train? Do you like the people you are with?

“If you can say yes to all three, you have found a passion,” she says. “It doesn’t matter the level of swimming you get to or the success that you have. You are going to be rewarded. I guarantee it.”

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