swimmed swammed swummed

Found this boulder in the middle of the Umpqua River; glad I
didn't find it with my nose …

Vacation leftovers:

• Overwhelming thought: Homeward bound on my 5,000-meter race up in the Cascades a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't outswim the thought of how they do it … how all those swimmers can swim 20-plus miles across the daunting English Channel ('tis the season), the Catalina Channel, Lake Tahoe, or even a 10k race. I'm drained completing three miles.

• Retroactively thunk thought: Haley Anderson from Granite Bay (just a 20-minute drive from where I live) won the silver medal in the 10k race at the London Olympics. She finished the 6.2-mile open water swim just four-tenths of a second (!) behind the Hungarian gold medalist, Eva Risztov. Over the final 1,000 meters, the 20-year old swimmer churned from fourth to fractions of a second behind the winner. Anderson swam the race in one hour, 57 minutes, 38 and six-tenths seconds. That is still faster than I managed to swim half that distance up in the Cascades. I wonder if she'd join our ragtag swim group out on Lake Natoma.

Haley's older sister Alyssa shared a gold in the women's 4 by 200 freestyle relay at the London Olympics. Two Olympic medalists from one games, from one family. What're the odds? Alyssa can swim with us too, I guess.

• Canoe!: Canoes outnumber kayaks 10 to one atop cars in mountainous central Oregon (quite the opposite in my neighborhood). Though I like kayaks, I love canoes. It's tradition for our family (well, me, and sometimes my wife) to blurt "Canoe!" at the sight of one atop of a vehicle, the same way someone might say "Puppy!" (And Rat, according to Stephan Pastis' "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip, defines tradition as "a reason for doing something you can no longer think of a reason for doing.")

A canoe contains romance for me, and since I declare myself fairly accomplished at steering one, I yearn for quiet waters to rove on early mornings. My one material longing would be for an 18-foot Kevlar™®© or carbon fiber canoe, luggable by one person, with which to wander backwaters so deep the mosquitoes could airlift me back to my car.

I long for such a canoe the way some might crave a wristwatch that tells time at 20,000 times the price of a Timex™and is only recognizable by others wearing similar watches … I'm sorry: Timepieces.

•  Stay out of my summer!: C'mon, NFL, your meaningless preseason games have taken over the sports media. Your games, a week hence, are listed in the broadcast schedule in my paper above today's baseball games, and Major League Baseball is fighting down the home stretch, with the Giants, my favorite team, at first place in its division, the drama intense. Baseball stays out of football's way, for the most part. Why can't football go dark for another month or so? I know this happens every year, but it's on my last nerve this year.
 
• Shows what I know: Someone please enlighten me: How did central and eastern Europe come to dominate men's water polo? It's not the sport I'd imagine that part of the world to champion, but I'm picayune and too narrow minded. Croatia won the gold, Serbia the bronze. Croatia, Serbia and Hungary destroyed the U.S. men's team, the golden boys of swimming pools and SoCal beaches (again, picayune pea brain, that's me), made 'em look like they had just picked up the game the week before. What's the evolution of water polo in Europe?

• Shows what I know, II: Team handball would wear me out, surely, but there's something off about it. Is it the progenitor for all similar sports? Did someone playing it say, "This is fun and all, but if you really want a challenge, we should try to play without using our hands (soccer), or move the ball with sticks (hockey), heck strap on some skates (ice hockey) and make it really interesting. Did Dr. Naismith decide, "Let's shrink the goal to a tiny hoop and require players who wanted to keep the ball had to bounce it all the time?" Someone else must have said, "If you really want a challenge, let's do this in the water," and gave birth to water polo.

Having come late to team handball (and seriously doubting I'll see it again until four years hence) I'm reminded of finally seeing "High Noon," the seminal man-alone-against-the-world Gary Cooper western, and thinking it hokey because I grew up on a steady diet of Gunsmoke, Bonanza and every other movie and show turned original movie moments into clichés.

• Crass act: Why do athletes pretend to bite their medals? Whether this gesture derives from fact or Dickensian fiction, it's meant to show how people might tell if their gain is real gold, since the soft metal would show teeth marks; it implies the giver might have cheated recipients. Though the geasture might have lost its historical meaning, and athletes and photographers think it may be cute, it's rude to receive such a high honor, one of a kind, crafted to celebrate athletic achievement, and put it in your mouth. We get a two-year reprieve from seeing that.

• Fish, meet pond: Time was I swam in pools only because I knew no other. Now I'm in lakes most of the time and in a pool almost never. Stopping over in Eugene where our daughter goes to school, I ran out of swim choices except for a pool, within walking distance. The online schedule listed open times and prices, but did not specify that two separate swim teams would be going through their paces during lap swim and using all lanes. Lanes were marked "slow" "medium" and "fast" and I had no idea what the teams really meant by that. Finding a man alone in a lane, I got permission to swim with him, but he swam in circle within the lane, rather than up and down one side, so I would have had to look for him constantly throughout my swim because I didn't know how fast he swam and whether he would swim up against me. Plus, the pool water wasn't all that clear, and the high water temperature in the cool morning left the surface in a foam of mist, so I couldn't see much. I was out in 10 minutes. Keep your pool; give me the open water any time.

• Back home: It's a big change from 4,893 feet above sea level, to 128 feet above. Lake Natoma is so much easier to swim in, unlike the mountain lakes on our vacation. Not easy; it's never easy for me. But it feels so much better.

In the swim

Short of schlepping pop-up tents and tables, and operating a stopwatch, I was not much help with our daughter's sports. When allowed, I designed logos instead.

I took advantage of our kids' high school's lack of graphic standards (tightened up recently, with Boston College apparently asking the school to stop using a modification of its eagle logo; though the football team still uses the Philadelphia Eagles' helmet insignia) to come up with a water polo design one season. It just had to be eagle-ish and use the words El Camino or the initials EC.

Inspired by the motivational coaches on our daughter's team, and the cohesive boys' and girls' water polo program (and, I admit, a short-lived trend in baroque flourishes in TV and clothing design for the teen demographic), I created this fire-and-water look evoking a bird in flight. Water for the battleground, and fire for the passion with which the teams often played.

Here are some variations for a summer program, not yet used (left):

Maura's youth swim team changed its name from the Sea Wolves to the Piranhas. though I did artwork for the former, it's locked away in 20th Century digital storage and I've yet to get a chance to pry it out.

This is the mark (below) I did for the Piranhas, which I understand the team still uses.

Confessions of a coach

Each Pirate that year got a customized baseball card. Our son's highlighted his
ability to steal bases almost at will. Stealing home became his specialty.

Baseball bits and pieces, Part II:

Pity the
coach's kid.

Whether a wunderkind or just one of the team, the child of a coach bears the added burden of always having the coach afoot.

Other kids see only what passes for the ideal coach, at least in the coach's mind: Organized, fun-loving, motivational, inspirational, supportive.

Then the other kids get go to their homes and the coach's kid sees coach behind the scenes: Disorganized, haggard, hurried, deflating and, worse, projecting frustrations onto the one member of the team who's handy.

For the kid, it's like knowing all along that the great and powerful coach is really some small person  behind the curtain pulling levers and twisting valves. Only without the fabulous going-away prizes.

So it was with our son, whom I coached six years in Little League, and helped coach three seasons in soccer (Not to mention 11 years as a den leader in Cub Scouts and scoutmaster in Boy Scouts.)

The kid got to (had to) do a lot on the ballfield …

Luckily after all those years, I didn't separate him from his love of baseball. It survived intact.

It's no small wonder, though: So many car rides in which I fumed over us being late to practice or having forgotten something, or got angry when he didn't model the cooperative behavior I wanted from all the players; I didn't communicate those expectations very well — shouldn't really have sought them in the first place — and after all, he was just a kid, just like all the other kids. Kids without coaches at home.

(It was less so for our daughter, though she probably caught some of the peripheral flak. Because her softball seasons coincided with Little League, I helped coach her team only when I could, as the assistant's assistant. She and the girls on her team early on were more interested in sophisticated chants from the dugout than in digging out grounders, and I was useless for chants.

[When our daughter began water polo, I was experienced enough — made it almost all the way through one entire practice in high school! — to know the sport is probably the most physically demanding sport going, and smart enough to know I didn't know the game; I designed artwork for the team instead, and limited my cheering to, "Go, Mo!" and "Go (whatever team Mo was playing for)!"]

Despite all the self-imposed sturm und drang, I enjoyed coaching, especially the front-row seat to see kids progress in their skills and grow in unexpected ways.

Though I understand the chronic criticism about children today getting rewarded for anything, a culture in which everyone gets a trophy so that no one loses self-esteem, I still wanted to celebrate each player for what they accomplished as players and were as people. Instead of trophies, I made tokens of celebration. I designed season-end T-shirts one year, and a couple of years created custom caricatures, including one-of-a-kind oversized baseball cards.

These are the ones I did for our son. When we were the Dodgers (Oh, how it strained us to don Dodger gear, but we sucked it up and carried on), Liam was just beginning to put his understanding and ability together. He played all around the field mostly because (poor coach's kid!) I was constantly making room for other players to try positions.

On the Pirates the next year, Liam became speedy (he'd go lean in one growth spurt, wide the next, and this was the lean season), and figured out how to take advantage of a ballfield's quirks and opponents' inconsistencies to steal his way around the bases.

Though gifts to the players, the tokens were just as much gifts to myself, reminding me (though some days my head was thicker than on others) that above all the kids come out to the park to have fun. That goes just as much for the coach's kid.