By Benjamin Liang, staff writer
I’ve been dedicated to 2 sports during my life, but trying to be completely committed to both at the same time wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Right now my life is solely focused on becoming the best basketball player I can be, but before basketball, I was all about swimming.
I first started to learn how to swim in 5th grade, where my mom would bring me to take swimming lessons at my local YMCA. Considering how people start competitively swimming in early elementary school, I had a later start than most people. I struggled at the beginning, with learning how to do all the strokes, pushing off the wall, and dolphin kicking. My swim instructor was not helpful either as he would pick on me because I was not a strong swimmer as well as because I didn’t understand much English. But that didn’t stop me from swimming. I wanted to prove him wrong and be a better swimmer than him.
I continued swimming till the end of 6th grade, and I felt confident enough to try out for the YMCA’s competitive team. I met a lot of friends after joining the swim team. It was my favorite childhood experience. We had practices Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. We would have swim meets once a month. Every meet was so much fun. I have vivid memories of waking up early, hopping into the cold pool to warm up at 7am in the morning, finding out I’m in the same heat as my friends, and breaking personal records. Everything about swimming was enjoyable, even the 6 am practices on Saturdays.
I loved swimming. I started to take competitive swimming seriously during 8th grade. My swim coach recommended that I start going to morning practice every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So my week would be filled with at least one swim workout a day. It was exhausting to swim so much. It was so much work, but I knew if I kept consistent with the effort and dedication I would see results.
The summer after 8th grade was an important summer for me. Summer is where we would go to most of our meets, so it would be the perfect time to showcase what I’ve been working for. I went on that summer surprising myself with what I accomplished. Breaking whatever record I had from previous meets and becoming one of the fastest swimmers on the team.
That was also the summer I fell in love with basketball. Two totally different sports that require immense amounts of training to be good at. But I didn’t want to give up on either one.
When I started my first year of high school, I was still swimming 6 times a week at the time. But Basketball season was slowly inching in on my time. Basketball season started in October, but club swimming was all year long. The first couple of months of high school was manageable because I was only doing swimming.
But once basketball season kicked in, I had to skip some swimming practices to accommodate my after school basketball practices. On top of that, there was school/homework. All of the pressure piled up exhausting me both physically and mentally, to the point where I knew I would eventually have to make a decision between the two sports.
I began coming up with excuses and skipped a lot of swim practices. It was easy to slack off and skip one or two practices, but it became a habit. I told myself that I would continue swimming after basketball season and it would be easy for me to get back into it.
Basketball season ended around February, I finally had the time to continue swimming again, but it was hard. I lost my speed, stamina and passion for swimming. It felt like I was doing it because I promised myself I would. But shortly after the big news hit the entire world. We went into quarantine and sports weren’t priorities anymore.
I never went back to swim competitively because after the pandemic the team fell apart, people quit, graduated or moved on to other hobbies.
3 years later, looking back right now, it feels like I was just making up excuses. I couldn’t own up to the challenge and gave myself the easy way out. I kept telling myself that it was okay to quit and come back later. I thought it was manageable to do both sports at the same time, reminiscing right now I learned that things are always easier said than done. But ultimately I’m glad that I involved swimming in my life, it challenged me and shaped the person I am today.
