I realize I’ve been talking a lot about my kid’s involvement in swimming lately but it really has consumed much of our free time and it’s something we can get excited about as a family.

I’m always so impressed when I watch kids who are six to ten years old doing things in the water I have never been able to do; flip turns, the butterfly, swimming more than two lengths without needing a giant ring tossed in my direction with a slushy pina colada in a coconut sailing by on a flutter board.

While this particular special moment has nothing to do with anything my kids did, it’s certainly something they could have. Something we are all capable of. Something we may have done before.

Someone made a mistake.

I was busy learning the ins and outs of my first ever shift as an amateur timer on the pro tour and was especially interested in what unfolded about half way through the swim meet as it was taking place in my lane. The lane I had staked my claim to. The lane I had shoveled short and curlies from the diving block with my new, white flip-flops. The lane when kids were asked their names prior to racing, I would re-name them what I thought best suited their personalities based entirely on how they looked in a bathing cap and goggles. Would you believe I had two Brutus’s?

There was a relay race where four swimmers were expected to swim the front crawl to the end, flip turn and return to my squeaky clean, hair-free post before their teammate next in line could dive in and swim their laps.

The first swimmer dove in while his team cheered him on and I held my stop watch in perfect alignment with the third ceiling duct, string hanging around my neck, finger poised to click stop, thinking about what “Poppy” (the red headed girl who was heading in my direction) might actually be named.

The second swimmer dove perfectly and right on time except he did something strange when he came up for air. Instead of swimming the front crawl like his teammate and all other teams before him, as was indicated on the “heat sheet” like the world was expecting, he instead struggled through two lengths of butterfly.

The team cheers went from a surge of excitement to shrieking in his direction, but to no avail at a child who was so focused on doing the butterfly to perfection, spending the majority of his two lengths entirely underwater, he couldn’t hear coaches, fans, janitorial staff motioning to change to front crawl and screaming at the top of their lungs.

When Butterfly Ben got out of the pool, he looked around at the empty lanes. The other teams had finished well before he had. He was confused.

We’ve all been down that lane. The path where we think we are doing the right thing and we work hard to do it well when the rest of the world knows, this might just be the wrong path and it’s time to change strokes.

What impressed me most were B-Ben’s ten year old teammates; Curly, Moe and Brutus (2). Curly reached out a hand to help Ben out of the water while Moe said, “It’s okay buddy. We’re not mad at you.”

I know B-Ben was disappointed but his team wasn’t. Maybe they were even a little relieved that someone else took the pressure off. Someone else was the first to fumble. He handled it with grace, they all did.

They came in dead last in that race but they left a stronger team with a great story to tell and an experience they would take with them for the rest of the season.

I hope, even longer.