Alexea Hankin & Sean Murphy
The Murmur
Waterford Kettering HS
1st Place
Division 2, News Writing
Sports News Story
If you’re ever looking for senior Josh Schwimmer, you may find him in the computer lab programming, or in Mr. Smitka’s classroom working on Robotics. An even better place to go looking, though, is the Waterford Kettering Fitness Center, otherwise known as the pool—Schwimmer’s been swimming since he was very young, and has been on Kettering’s Varsity team since his freshman year. However, Schwimmer feels as though swimming is not as respected of a sport as other “mainstream” ones.
“People assume swimming is very easy mainly because their only experience with swimming is jumping and splashing around with their friends,” Schwimmer said.
This feeling is not exclusive to swimmers. Many athletes at Kettering, and around the world, participate in what could be called “minority” sports. These are the sports that are typically not as televised as others, the ones that are just less popular. However, this does not make them easy. In the case of swimming, Schwimmer argues, it is much more difficult than a more well-known sport.
“You use most of your body in swimming, unlike track and cross country where it consists of mainly your legs and core,” Schwimmer said. “[Swimming] takes a lot of hard work, effort, sacrifices, and a lot of pain to be successful.”
Like any sport, practice is required to succeed. Schwimmer’s practices are usually two to three grueling hours long—and other minority sports deal with the same sort of time limits. Sophomore Heather Smyth, a gymnast, says that her practices are usually the same amount as Schwimmer’s, and also just as hard.
“Gymnastics is by far one of the hardest sports in the world,” Smyth said. “Not everyone can flip around multiple times with just a single jump, and not many people are skilled enough to make it look easy either.”
That being said, Smyth believes some people think gymnastics is easy. Sophomore Kara Federico, another gymnast, agrees. She says that some people only believe their sport is easy because of the way it looks.
“I feel they think it’s easy because they think we just prance around in our leotards all day,” Federico said. “And they think that our skills are easy to do, but they aren’t at all. It takes a lot of time and effort to gain our skills, and I feel like they think we just get up and do it in one try.”
Federico brings up a topic that many athletes feel is true to their own sport: spectators of any sport only really see performances or plays after hours and hours of back-braking practice, making the sport look “easy.” However, the practices are usually where all of the pain and general hardships happen.
“Some people think we only do it for the skirts,” senior Annabelle Feyers, the captain of the Varsity cheer team, said. “Because we’re girls. We’re seen a lot at games, and that’s fun, but no one sees the competitions which is the hardest part [of cheering].”
Feyers explains that some sports look easier than they seem because of how well practiced they are. The point of performances, she says, is to make everything look easy when it took a lot of time and effort to get to that point. Freshman Kaitlyn Piggott, who dances on Kettering’s varsity team, says that this is typical.
“I do think people assume dance is easy,” Piggott said. “But just like any other sport, it requires a lot of hard work and dedication. People tell me all the time that dance is the easiest sport you could play but they haven’t actually tried it.”
And, in Piggott’s and many other athlete’s eyes, that’s the counter argument to every sports critic: don’t knock it till you try it.