10 Signs You May Be a Helicopter Swim Parent   When I was a kid, we didn’t have year-round sports in my small town. We didn’t specialize in one sport at an early age or take private lessons.   Today, we spend countless hours driving our kids to practice—at dawn, in the evenings, to meets on weekends—50 weeks a year. We want our kids to be successful in academics and swimming. All this emphasis on success can lead to “helicopter parenting.”   We helicopter for many reasons. We no longer...

5 Tips for Getting Back into Your Swimming Routine   Whether it was Ryan Murphy’s world record in the 100m backstroke, Katie Ledecky’s freestyle clinic, or Michael Phelps cleaning up the medals for the last time, watching the Rio Games was exhilarating.   If you are like most swimmers, you felt the strong pull of the pool calling out to you, the Olympics creating some serious motivation to get back into the pool and unleash some effort on your own goals, whether they are based in being in Tokyo in...

Finding Morning Motivation By Mike Gustafson//Correspondent   The alarm clock goes off. It’s like a shock to the system. Your bedroom is dark. Other than the ear-cringing beeping, all else is still. You think there’s no possible reason any human being should ever wake up this early. No human being should wake before dawn to leap into a large body of cold, freezing water and immediately hike the heart rate beyond 140 beats per minute as a coach, arms-crossed, gives you impossibly hard, mentally and physically-exhausting exercises.   And yet, lying...

Power Your Willpower USA Swimming   Athletes in every sport have been introduced to the idea of willpower and how necessary that characteristic is to success at elite levels of sport. Willpower is one of those vaguely explained and often misunderstood concepts in the language of sport. One of the more popular descriptions of how you demonstrate willpower is having "unshakable perseverance and self-control that is directed toward a goal or objective in spite of adversity, physical demand, physical pain, or how much time it takes to succeed."    More

Heat Sheets & More Available for SPA Meet   Host Club, St. Pete Aquatics (SPA) has released the Psych Sheets, Warm-up Lane Assignments and the Heat Sheets for this weekend's meet at Northshore Pool.  Be sure you look at the Psych Sheets and check out the competition, see where your are seeded and what you have to do to move up!   Warm-up  times for everyone have been assigned by team, so be sure to check with your coach to see what time you need to be there each day...

WATCH: Ryan Lochte on Dancing With the Stars   Ryan Lochte once again stole headlines last night for the wrong reasons on the season-premier of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars after a pair of Brazilian protesters rushed the stage while he was receiving feedback from the judges. The protesters, wearing white shirts that said “Lochte” with a slash through them, were apparently upset over the incident in which Ryan Lochte and 3 of his teammates urinated on a gas station bathroom, and then Lochte tore down a sign and told...

National Team to Face Big Ten Conference Stars in USA College Challenge, Presented by Arena   Members of the USA Swimming National Team will square off against collegiate swimming stars from the Big Ten Conference in the inaugural USA College Challenge, Presented by arena, USA Swimming announced today.   The short-course yards dual meet is slated for Nov. 12-13 at the Indiana University Natatorium on the campus of IUPUI in downtown Indianapolis. “The USA College Challenge, Presented by arena, will be an exciting competition for swimmers and fans alike,” said...

  Five Destructive Parenting Habits We Must Replace By Tim Elmore, Growing Leaders, August 30, 2016 Now that my kids are grown adults, I feel more comfortable teaching both parents and faculty the art of leading young people into healthy maturity. Like many parents, my experience raising my first child enabled me to relax a bit on my second child. We tend to obsess at the tiniest quirk in our first baby, and by child number three, we’re not as stressed. In fact, I just read this sequence and chuckled...

USADA Update   Is it a food, a dietary supplements or a drug? Answer:  It might be all three. There is a difference between energy drinks & sport drinks. When it comes to the use of supplements, risks exist. Do you know what those risks are?

Signs & Symptoms of Swimmer’s Ear (Sponsored) By Dara Torres, paid spokesperson for Alcon As swimmers, we are in the water year round, whether we’re doing laps at practice or racing in a meet. And now that it’s summer, you may find yourself in the water even more than usual. This means we could be more prone to getting Swimmer’s Ear—medically known as “acute otitis externa” or “AOE” for short. As a swimmer and a mom to my own little swimmer, I am very familiar with Swimmer's Ear. In fact,...