Swimming back and forth for a length of about two hours gives a girl time to think. I came across the thought of you, my coaches. I thought of how much you can change in order to help us become better swimmers and better people. You need impose rules in which we are required to spend a total of at least 20 hours a week practicing, have to swim until we puke our guts out, and are required to go to every swim meet and give up our whole weekend. These rules will force us to become better.

Right now, you, as coaches, offer a total of 12 hours a week. That is not even close enough to help us improve our strokes. We should give our whole life up to swimming. We should be asking ourselves as swimmers, “What is a social life?” Adding AT LEAST another 8 hours of swimming would make life even better and our swimming even better. Studies show that 10,000 hours of practice are needed in order to become a professional athlete. I know all of the other swimmers would agree with me on this subject and we know that these 10,000 hours are required. We want to become professional athletes and will do anything to get there. We all want to give up our lives to swimming. We should have no friends and have no time to do our homework. There is no other way to go about this task.

While I brought up the subject of homework, let me just talk about how you should also dumb down the importance of homework. Homework should not be an excuse to miss practice. Homework does not matter whatsoever. It does not have anything to do with grades, and does not affect our future at all. Do not take the “I have too much homework” excuse.

A new requirement that should be added is that we should have to swim until we puke our guts out. That should be required in order to leave practice. Puking our guts out is good for us. That is what people have always told me and I totally agree. It makes us all stronger as individuals and swimmers. No one needs to understand why we puking makes us stronger, it just does. Becoming stronger would enable us to swim those long events and never get tired because we have swam until we puked our guts out.

Swim meets should also be required. A swim meet takes up a whole weekend and allows a swimmer to spend their whole life at the pool. Since you go to practices all week and then on the weekend you spend around 8 hours each day at a swimming pool. Again, swimmers should not know what a social life is. Swimmers like spending all of the time at the swimming pool and when they sweat they like smelling like chlorine. In gym, us, swimmers love when people ask why it smells like chlorine when they are not even near the pool. We know they are referring to us because the smell permeates off us. This is due to the fact that we spend our lives at the pool. Swim meets are needed in order to get used to the competition and realize how tired you are after the week of practice you just had.

You, as coaches, should imply these new rules in order to help us become better swimmers and individuals. Having no social life and being sore every night is how I want to live my life. I don’t want to have any friends or any time to spend with family. My swim team should become my family. So coaches, impose these new rules in order to help us swimmers to become the best we can possibly be.