Diving Deeper into the Swim Community
Imagine walking onto a pool deck, as someone who knows nothing about swimming, and hearing the coach on deck saying "We're leaving on the top for 8x200s aerobic on 3:00." You wouldn't know what they were talking about, right? However, us competitive swimmers would. For the rest of the semester, I would like to focus and truly hone in on the discourse community of competitive swim, especially focusing on the teams I have been apart of in both Los Angeles and Orange County, to the one I am on at SDSU in San Diego!
All six parts of a discourse community - common public goals, methods of communicating among members, participatory communication methods, genres that define the group, a lexis, and a standard of knowledge needed for membership, are all present in this discourse community. First, we all have the common public goals of working to improve our techniques, compete at high levels and score points for the team, help the team succeed, and work and train hard. Second, we all have ways to communicate - we communicate online through social media, TeamWorks, and GroupMe, and coaches also communicate to us on deck explaining sets, writing workouts, etc. Third, we participate in this community by attending practices, competing in meets, giving other teammates feedback, and swimming relays. Fourth, we have recognizable genres, including practice sets, heat sheets, psych sheets, meet standards/times, and coach announcements. Fifth, this community has its own lexis, including words such as aerobic, threshold, underwaters, 2x200s, on the top, etc. that have specific meanings to the swimmers during practice. Lastly, we all share required knowledge; to be apart of the team, you are required and expected to understand everything that comes with being a competitive, elite swimmer, such as strokes, turns, starts, lane etiquette, practice intervals, training, meet procedures, basic swimming terminology, etc.
When I moved from LA to Orange County, I learned how much language matters to each team individually, and how it can drastically differ between them. For example, in LA, my team said "subkicks", while my team in Orange County said "underwaters". Both terms mean the same thing, but they clearly differ between teams that are only an hour and a half apart! This interests me. When I moved, I had to learn my new team's way of talking about certain things, which made me realize this community is deeper than just a group of swimmers who know how to work hard and swim fast.
An article I found, "Do You Speak Swimming?" from U.S. Masters Swimming, talks about the terms different coaches across the nation use and how it can sometimes be confusing if different coaches or swimmers use different terms to explain instructions, drills, sets, or techniques. This makes me think of my own experience of this when I moved teams.
In addition, this discourse community creates documents of their own that I study and look at often, for example the SDSU Swim and Dive's news page that shares the news of the team, their highs and new records, schedules, meet recaps, announcements, etc. for prospective swimmers, families, and other supporters. I also look at team messages sent on GroupMe by team captains or coaches, which is an example of literature or documents I study inside the community.
There are so many aspects about this community that interests me, but what interests me the most is how we as swimmers learn to belong to a team and truly become apart of the team family by learning the language and shorthand of the team. I'm curious how quickly a new teammate picks up a new team's language or whether sometimes it makes a new teammate feel uncomfortable that they aren't "in the know" of the team yet. What also interests me is the different values that each team holds - teams across the world have similar values, but I have noticed that there are different traditions across teams and different sets of rules and expectations, depending where you are at; I think that can be interesting to study!
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