The Swim Meet, and it's Past

After all of that practicing, you have to pay off all of your hard work...and swim in a swim meet!

Before you actually go to the meet, you or your coach has to sign you up for the meet and the events you are going to swim in that meet. Normally you do that online, and then your coach enters you in the events you chose online and your team mates events into that meet, unless it is a championship meet. For championship meets, you have to have qualifying times. You still have to have your coach enter you in the meet, but you don't get to pick what you swim, you have to qualify. In other cases your coach would pick the events you swim. Some teams do that, where your coach just puts you in whatever events he or she thinks that you need to improve, that you could score high for the team, or various reasons. First you would have to tell your coach if you are swimming in that meet though. So it's not like the coach picks what meets you swim, but does encourage you to swim as many meets as possible.

Do you know where swimming came from, or how all four strokes came into swimming? Well just swimming, not competitively, but just any kind of swimming came from a discipline for cave man. They had to swim across a river or a lake. That is also what gave them the idea of having swimming be a sport, but that didn't start until the early nineteen hundreds. The first stroke that was swam, or developed was the breaststroke, or something like that, that eventually became the breaststroke. Then soon after that freestyle was "invented". Those were the two first strokes that came into swimming. Those were also the only two strokes that were swam at the Olympic Games. Not until 1904 that changed. Backstroke and butterfly were also brought into swimming. Butterfly came from breaststroke. In the Olympics, people realized that you could go much faster by bringing both of your arms over you head. That then became the butterfly. Now all of the four strokes were created. Before only men could swim the Olympics. That changed in 1912. That was the first Olympics where women could also swim in the Olympic Games too.

If you didn't know what a swimming pool looked like, there is a picture below of one. The picture below it is someone swimming breaststroke because that was the first stroke to be swam at the Olympic Games, and just overall.