By: Xander Mui, staff writer
Being forced to participate in extracurricular activities by your parents is something that almost everyone has dealt with before. Whether it be piano, soccer or art classes, I’m sure many people didn’t enjoy it. When I was 5 years old, my parents began making me take swimming lessons.
I started off with swimming lessons at the Chinatown YMCA. I was joined by my friends from school which made going to swimming lessons more enjoyable. However, when they quit, my parents did not allow me to, so I began dreading to go to lessons.
After a few years of lessons, my parents decided to have me join SFRP Rossi Swim Team, a competitive swim team. It was difficult for me to find motivation to swim since I found the sport boring. Swimming back and forth in freezing-cold water, staring at a black line running down the bottom of the pool was nothing that any 10 year old boy would want to do for 2 hours, 3 days a week. Every day I would count the minutes until practice was over.
I’ve talked to my parents many times about quitting but they would get angry and tell me that it’s good for me and my health. I didn’t like how I didn’t even get to decide for myself whether or not I wanted to swim. I was already physically, emotionally, and mentally fit, but I still had to swim..
I found out that one of my friends was at another team, Daly City Dolphins, so my family transferred me there. I wasn’t sure what hit me, but something in me had changed after I switched teams. I felt much more at home because both the swimmers and the coaches were very welcoming and put a lot of faith and effort into me. I felt like I couldn’t let them down.
I began viewing swimming as a way to connect with people and not just a boring sport that my family forced me to participate in. 2 hours of practice began to feel like seconds. Before I would only swim 3 days or less per week, but now I would swim almost every day. It was the first time I’ve truly enjoyed swimming.
However, as all great things must come to an end, the team that I swam with fell apart. Swimmers moved to other teams during the pandemic, coaches found better jobs or had to move away for college, and the remaining swimmers were left with nothing. No other team that I’ve joined ever felt the same. Even though this is the first year in almost 10 years of swimming, I’ve learned that joining an activity that I hated initially gets so much better when you make connections with people. Eventually you learn to love it.
