Personal Narrative: High School Swim Team

To start off this story, we have to go back to the beginning of the school year of August 2012. When I started at Lutcher High School, I decided to join the swim team. I was only a seventh grader, but I wanted to be part of the team with my older cousin, Kadam. Swimming started, and I struggled due to my size and strength. I never gave up, though. My goal was one day to follow in my cousin’s footsteps and qualify for state. My cousin, Kadam, was unexpectedly killed in a car accident a week before the state meet my sophomore year. Coach Lanny who is always so serious and fussing asked the swim team to allow me to travel with the qualifying swimmers to state, and I was able to have a little taste of how I would feel if I could reach my dream

It was my fifth year on the team, and I was determined this was the year my goal would be met to qualify for state. Being on the team for so long, I’ve seen many people accomplish that goal but for me, it never seemed to possible. I’ve always been one of the slowest on the team because I wasn’t as athletic as many of my teammates were like Ethan and Gage. Ethan and Gage were two of my athletics classmates that were strong swimmers and had no problem qualifying. I chose to change that, though. I decided to push myself by swimming with my school team four days a week at our local pool, and then travel to Baton Rouge twice a week at night to swim at Crawfish Aquatics. Crawfish Aquatics was an indoor pool where trained instructors would help swimmers throughout the surrounding parishes improve their strokes techniques and improve their swimming times. I was swimming so much that I always could smell the chlorine on my body. The training was brutal, but I was hoping to improve my time by getting stronger and more in shape. My speed and endurance increased dramatically. I went from one of the slowest to becoming just as fast as everyone else. Since I wasn’t considered a sprint swimmer, due to my athletic ability and endurance, I chose to become an endurance swimmer. I swapped from doing sprint events like the fifty freestyle and the one hundred freestyle to endurance events like the two hundred freestyle and

We gathered at school and was served breakfast at the public relation building. The qualifying swimmers gathered on a chartered bus to drive to Sulfur. He arrived at our hotel, the Holiday Inn. This was a nice hotel with clean rooms and was close to the Spar Aquatics, the state swim meet facility. It is a huge complex where all divisions travel to compete at state level. It has two large pools, one used for competing and one used for swimmers to warm-up or cool down. The facility can house many swimmers and fans from the variety of schools that attend. After Coach Lanny fed us and the team got settled into their rooms, we jumped on the bus again to head to Spar Aquatics. As soon as I walked in, I could smell all of the chlorine and see all of the fans. My adrenaline was pumping, and I was ready to swim. We jumped into the pool for warm-ups, and then we just had to wait for our event to start. My nerves started to take over. It was time for me to swim the two hundred freestyle event. You heard the lane judge tell the swimmers to take their mark, which means to get ready. The next thing that I remember was hearing the siren to dive into the water and