The Joy of Young Swimmers: A Unique Perspective
The Watersprites Chapter 7 – Swim Club Challenges
The committee didn’t see it that way.
“You can’t just… let them jump the queue,” said Malcolm Brett, former record-holder in three age group events and now a persistent presence in the club office.
“They’re not jumping,” Jay replied. “They’re skipping. On a different axis.”
“I’ve got parents asking why these two get all the attention.”
“They don’t get all of it.”
“They get yours.”
Jay didn’t answer.
Freya soon gathered admirers. Girls from gymnastics and athletics squads orbited her like she was a fallen comet. Her stillness invited curiosity. Her occasional words—sung more than spoken—only deepened the intrigue. She copied expressions like a theatre student and once described the feeling of water in her ear as “like whales humming to the stars.” Her fan club was sealed that day.
Hersch was more complex work.
He never stopped moving. Didn’t seem to care about lane etiquette, timing sheets, or why breaststroke always got him disqualified. He was a sunshine with ADHD. A para swimmer named Benji adopted him like a younger sibling.
“This one’s mad,” he told his friend Zara. “I like him.”
The friction wasn’t all underwater.
Beth overheard mutterings in the stands. A father with a spreadsheet. A mum who’d raised two county-level kids.
“You see the girl? With the pale eyes?”
“Never seen her before.”
“Jay’s pet project.”
“Does she even go to school?”
Beth tightened her grip on the folder in her lap. Her fingers itched to label and index. But her heart, already half-tethered, whispered: Protect them first. Write the paper later.
That Sunday, Jay led an open skills session. The final drill: “Dolphin Mode.”
“Hands at your sides,” he instructed, “body undulation only. If you can hit the five-metre flags without surfacing, dinner’s on me.”
Hersch grinned. Freya glanced sideways.
Jay set them off, racing dive from the blocks “Three, Two, One”.
Twenty metres in, Hersch darted upward, burst from the surface, and quite literally flew over the flags before splashing down in lane five. It was chaos. Children cheered. One boy demanded he try it again with fins.
Beth clapped once, then caught herself.
Jay turned away, already feeling the tension on his shoulders.
In the family cubicle afterwards, Freya combed her fingers through her wet hair.
“I like this place,” she said softly. The words came strange but deliberate.
“It likes you,” Beth replied.
Hersch was singing something to himself in the echo of the tiled walls. Nonsense syllables. But joyful. Alive.
“Can we come again?” he asked.
Jay knelt to help zip his bag. “A few times a week. As long as we can.”
Outside, the sky turned apricot above the hornbeams.
Driving home, Freya watched the fields blur past the window. Hersch talked non-stop—describing his underwater turns as “eel dances” and calling the kickboard “the flying stone.”
Beth listened in silence, heart-whole, while Jay kept his eyes on the road and thought of certificates, forms, safeguarding declarations, gala registrations, and how long this fragile miracle could last before the grown-up world demanded to weigh, measure, and dissect it.
He would fight them if he had to.
But not tonight.
Tonight, they were swimmers.
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