Should You Protect Your Swimmer From Disappointment?

I am David Karasek, an Olympic finalist and Swiss record holder in the 200m IM, and I coach the mental side of racing for hundreds of competitive swimmers across Europe. Last week I had a few conversations with worried parents that all pointed at the same instinct, so I want to talk about it honestly.

Should I protect my child from disappointment in swimming?

No, and it is worth understanding why the instinct is so strong. Last week a parent told me it was too early for her daughter to compete internationally, too early to train more, too early to start any mental work. She was twelve. When I asked why, the honest answer underneath was not really about the training. It was I do not want to watch her get hurt. I understand that completely. But in competitive swimming, one thing is guaranteed to happen over and over again: your swimmer is going to feel defeated, disappointed, sad and frustrated. That is not a sign the sport is going wrong. It is the sport.

So the goal was never to build a career with no disappointment in it. That does not exist. The goal is to teach your swimmer to meet those difficult emotions and move through them, because that is what quietly builds a solid, successful character.

Why shielding a swimmer from disappointment backfires

When you postpone the disappointment, you do not cancel it, you just send it to a future version of your child who has had less practice handling it. The letdown is coming either way. The only variable you actually control is whether they meet it early, with your support and the right guidance, or later, alone, when the stakes feel much higher.

And here is the part parents underestimate: learning to handle disappointment is not a swimming skill, it is a life skill. The swimmers who are guided through the hard swims come out more courageous, more resilient and more grounded, and that shows up far beyond the pool. Protecting them from the discomfort protects them from the very thing that would have made them stronger.

The sooner they learn to face disappointment with the right guidance, the sooner they become mentally strong, and that strength leaks into every other part of their life.

There is always a bigger pond

You cannot outrun disappointment by staying where you win, because there is always a level up. Your swimmer dominates at regional level, knows everyone, feels like the big fish. Then they step up to nationals and suddenly they are not the fastest in the room. They fight to the top of nationals, go international, and again they are not the top dog. Unless your child happens to be Leon Marchand or Summer McIntosh, there is always someone faster at the next level.

Which means the disappointment is not a bug you can engineer out of your swimmer's path. It is 100 percent certain. So there is no real point in protecting them and postponing it. The families who understand this stop trying to build a frictionless path and start building a tougher, more capable kid instead.

What to do instead of protecting them

Swap protection for preparation. Three moves do most of the work, and none of them require your swimmer to feel bad less often. They just change what happens next.

1. Change the scoreboard to process goals. If the only measure of a good day is a personal best or a medal, your swimmer will be disappointed most weekends, because those do not come often. Out of 365 days you would be happy for three or four. Instead, define success as small, controllable wins: four underwaters instead of three, a braver first fifty, holding a breathing pattern. Those little challenges are a big goal broken into what they can do today, and a swimmer who is stacking them is happy and energised most days. Here is how we set swim goals that do not backfire.

2. Reframe the loss as the more powerful outcome. If your swimmer gives everything they have, then whatever the clock says is useful. Win the time they wanted, great, life goes on and they go back to training. Miss it, and yes it stings for a bit, but that is actually the more powerful of the two outcomes, because now there is a lesson to learn and something concrete to change. A disappointing season is very often the one right before the breakthrough. I lived that exact arc on my own way to an Olympic record.

3. Give them a pre-decided game plan. The reason disappointment sends kids down a hole is that in the moment they feel lost and do not know what to do. So decide it in advance. When your swimmer already knows, before they ever get on the blocks, exactly what they will do if the swim goes badly, they have a map instead of a spiral. Okay, I feel this, now I do this, then this, and soon the momentum comes back. This is the reset we teach for the moment it actually hits.

This is exactly what we build in the mental sessions on our camps, and this summer our swimmers get to learn it from world record holders Milorad Čavić and Peter Mankoč, who happen to be brilliant coaches and dads. It is one of the core pillars of Europe's most popular performance swim camp right now, alongside technique, competition-specific work and the underwater game.

The kids who make it are not the ones who were protected from getting knocked down. They are the ones who were taught, ahead of time, exactly what to do when it happens.

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