It's much more lonesome than the reality I have experienced.
In the reality I know, your team is there for you, on deck, yelling and cheering.
In some ways, swimming is a very individual sport. Your performance pretty much depends on you, alone. I guess, in some places, that's all there is.
In our experience, the team aspect has been huge. The team supports each of its members. Especially in high school, but to some extent in college, the parents support the team with hundreds of volunteer hours (before, during, and after meets), food, rides here and there (never mind rides to practice!), and of course we are there cheering whenever we can be.
Our high school has 80-90 girls on the swim team, and 40-50 boys. A swim parent can develop quite a network, over four years.
One of the things that I'm enjoying about the college swim experience is seeing people we know in random places. We saw a swimmer we recognized from high school, swimming for Emory last year at Carnegie Mellon, and we have seen swim parents we know at various places in Ohio.
We have been to enough college meets that we are starting to get to know other parents whose kids go to college with our daughter. It's good.
One final note on all of this -- our high school's colors are purple and white. So seeing all of Kenyon's purple and white was familiar and disconcerting at the same time. On one hand, purple and white is the way swimming is supposed to look (see the backstroke turn-warning flags over the pool?). On the other hand, I kept seeing all this purple and thinking "Oh, there's our team" ... and it wasn't.
One of the captains of our high school team when our kid was a sophomore is now a senior at Kenyon. Her parents can still wear their purple wardrobe to meets. We had to start over, looking for light blue..........
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