You don’t want to swim, not tonight. The water’s cold, 78 degrees, 20 degrees colder than your body temperature. Plus you still have homework, lots of it, but you won’t think about it until after practice ends. You’re nervous-it’s butterfly night, which is like swimming with a 28 pound cinder block strapped to your back. Coach is yelling at you to jump in. You take one sane breath, then leap. You have 4,000 yards of insanity left, nearly forty football fields of swimming.

And then next day, you have to convince your friends that swimming is a sport. They say, “Anyone can swim, it doesn’t any skill. All you do is move your arms and legs.” Maybe if you are swimming for recreational purposes, yes, but it is definitely untrue for competitive swimmers.

Competitive swimmers go to so many long practices and do dryland (aerobic exercises, like running and lifting), all to make their skill level increase. Swimmers need to learn and practice good technique, and technique takes time. Ask any athlete, and he or she will tell you that time is an athlete’s best friend.  

The dictionary definition of the word ‘sport’ also establishes swimming as a sport. It reads, “An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” Swim team qualifies for all of those terms.

Another reason I say it is a sport is because nobody but the swimmer can change the outcome of a race. They do not get a time-out in the middle of a race, they cannot blame the referee, and they cannot blame another swimmer. They just have to leave it all in the water and hope it is enough.

That brings us to my final point. “You need direct opposition for it to be considered a sport.” There is opposition, it is just not direct. They swim in a heat with either five or seven other people at a time. Just because swimmers do not have a physical interaction with the other swimmers, that doesn’t mean they don’t have opposition.