it could be worse

Over Christmas break, we had a swim meet that I didn't particularly want to go to (which I suppose implies that there are meets that I actually want to attend, which is not the case). It was on a Tuesday night, a whole slew of my kids were gone, and it was just about the last thing I wanted to do.

There were quite a few bumps along the way to that night, some faked injuries, and no shows from team members that landed us at a meet, having to scratch a total of 9 events. Scratching is where you say "hey, we're not swimming this!" Nine is a lot of events to scratch. And of the remaining events that we did swim, our kids false started in 3 of them, rendering the whole night a waste of time and money.

The night was made only slightly better by two things: one, my sister and M showed up to the meet. How fun to see M's little mouth form "GOOOOO!" as he cheered for no one in particular. Melt my heart. Second is this story:

At the start of the meet, I was talking to a coach, who was new this year, about how awful his year has been. The kids aren't respecting him, and he's having a hard time finding his place as coach. I told him that I think we all have bad first years, but that they will get better as the years go by.

Fast forward to 2 events left in the meet. I'm busy yelling at one of my swimmers for being selfish and not a team player (she quit the next day), when one of my boys taps me on the shoulder. He tells me he has something important to tell me. How important, I ask. Really important. So important that you can't wait 2 more events for the meet to be over, important? Yeah.

Turns out, while he was in the boys locker room changing after his last event he saw a kid from an opposing team take a shoe out of a locker, take it into the bathroom stall, poop in it, show it to his friends, and return it to the locker.

I asked my swimmer to repeat the story, twice, because I could hardly believe it. Who poos in a shoe? Apparently this kid does.

How awkward was it when I had to tell the coach of the hosting team that a kid from another team pooped in a shoe? Very.

My kid identified the poopatrator, and his coach, the newbie coach from the start of this story, apologized profusely. I didn't really care, since it wasn't one of my kids shoes, it just so happened that it was my kid who saw it happen.

My kid happens to be involved in a boys leadership group at school. Once a week they meet with a mentor and talk about what it means to be a leader. My swimmer, Z, later told me that as he was watching this happen, he thought what would a leader do right now? and he decided that a leader would tell someone. Way to go kid!

I found out this weekend what happened to the poopatrator. He was suspended from school for 5 days, and his mom made him go to the both the victims practice, and the hosting teams practice, to apologize for his antics, and he gave the victim $80 for a new pair of shoes.

When the newbie coach was telling me all of this this past weekend, I told him the story of Swirlygate. Not trying to one-up him, but just to let him know, it could be worse.