Just got the email from our swim team coordinator reminding us that sign-up for the swim team/dive team is around the corner. 6 weeks when you spend what feels like every waking moment at the pool cheering your kid and the entire rest of the ‘hood kids on at weekend meets.
When we lived in DC, I had no idea that there was this secret Bethesda world of neighborhood pools, or that there were over 10 swim teams in Bethesda alone. We sadly shuffled our way over to the public pool on Little Falls Pkwy or braved one of the bigger DC pools, somehow sensing we were missing out on something but not being able to put our finger on it. We naively put our name on the waitlist for Palisades pool and were fortunate to get off the list, five years later, just as we were moving to Carderock Springs.
Lo and behold, when our kids joined the Carderock dive/swim team a few years back, I learned that almost every neighborhood in Bethesda has a community pool, open only to residents of the surrounding neighborhood, and almost every one of those pools has a swim team. Each weekend, a hoard of cars rolls into our club’s parking lot, and big and little swimmers alike tumble out, their swimsuits festooned with the enemy team’s logo. If your kid belongs to one of these swim teams, you are required to slap one of the team’s circular magnets on your car. I am pretty sure it is a stated requirement in the parent swim team handbook, if the compliance rate on all the cars is anything to go by.
At our pool, we even have a little pre-team, the “mini-cudas”, made up of kids who can barely hold their heads above the water, who are taught how to swim by the much bigger ‘Cudas. There is something very sweet in watching the older teenagers teach the next generation of little swimmers how to blow bubbles and maybe, in a few years, join the team and swim a lap of the pool to the reward of a bright-colored ribbon. Go CUDAS!
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