Before I do a little storytelling, please enjoy the video that may or may not be at the top of this page, depending on how you are viewing this. I’m running this cool backyard dog agility competition/dog training event this summer, and I learned how to put together a Facebook post video (above) and a reel too, which is currently running in a variety of places, including YouTube. More info below.
Last week, I supported my daughter at the Artistic Swimming Junior Olympics in Arlington, Texas, and I have definitely not recovered yet.
It was quite the adventure, as these things always are. Sometimes people refer to our trips to national events as vacations, but they would be wrong. There is very little vacay involved. I’m so grateful to get to support my daughter in her endeavors, but these events are also exhausting and emotional. This year was no different, except for the fact that it was her last Junior Olympics. Next year, she’ll be swimming on the University of Florida’s Artistic Swimming Club team. She’s already looked up their 2026 National event location. It’s in California. I’m hoping that the university has some good fundraisers.
This year had some solid negatives, and I left feeling a little tender about it all. but, as always, there were valuable parts too. It was interesting to see how many people were there to support a comparatively small number of young people. Most of the supporters were adults, some with simple motivations (to support their children) and others with more complicated ones. Some of the coaches make synchro their full-time jobs, which might mean that they are well-educated in the rules of the sport as well as in child development, behavioral management, and coaching skills. Or those same people might be mostly on-the-job trained, coaching athletes like they were coached, regardless of the effectiveness of the methods. Some of them might be fine with cheating to win, because consistent placements will bring in more athletes and therefore more income. It’s not all sunshine and roses.
On my last day at the pool, I looked around at how many adults were involved, both working and cheering. There were so many people who could impact your child positively or negatively in just a few minutes. I guess we have to hope that there’s more good than bad among these people. But, at the same time, we should keep our eyes open. While things may not be fully corrected through a simple conversation, I think it’s important to remind our kids what we believe is right, even while we watch an adult do wrong.
My daughter has always been reasonably competitive in her sports. She had a chance to do reasonably well at the event, and she did, finishing in the ribbons (top 12) in two of her four events. But there were girls at the Junior Olympics who entered knowing they didn’t have much of a chance to do anything other than be in the bottom third of their events. Some of these girls attend the event every year, knowing that they are not in contention for any of the top spots.
On my flight home, I thought about those girls. Some of them are working their hardest with limited resources, and others are simply swimming “synchro” as part of their otherwise busy schedule. I feel like these girls may have figured out something that many need to learn: that the value in competing in a national event is not in the placement.
Are they entering to test themselves to see how far they’ve come? Or to celebrate the sport they love? Or because they just enjoy the way it feels to perform in front of a crowd?
It’s something I’d like to think about more, but for now, I’ll leave it for your consideration.
Today, while working on my video for my new Backyard Challenge (above), I realized that I needed an easy way to refer people to it without including the link to the sales page (because Facebook penalizes outside links in their algorithm). I have a website, but it didn’t have any reference to my Challenge on it because it hadn’t been fully updated in quite some time. SO, I had to do that before I could release the video, and that’s why it’s 10:53 11:39 11:55 pm on Monday night, and I’m still writing this.
I’m not very good with website updates, but I think it seems pretty okay, and now I have a place to start putting together things that I’m very slowly creating to sell, like my dog agility training exercises book. Soon, I’ll be branching out into some downloadable items that I’m pretty excited about. I have about 3 million ideas. I just have little time to make them more than ideas!
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This leave-in conditioner is super awesome.
This desk calendar is hopefully going to help me organize my projects better (along with my other two planners, sigh).
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