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A watery, half-full perspective on the start of another year in high school sports

A rainy day in late August has provided an opportunity to write about the fall high school sports season, and I intend to take full advantage.

This is the time of year when your local sports writers are gearing up for another nine-plus months of chronicling the athletic achievements of our high school athletes.

While the effort is already well underway for football and golf, the rest of the sports don't really get going until this week. So please keep an eye out for our previews in cross country, girls tennis, boys soccer and girls swimming and diving. We'll have a Sports Extra section devoted to those sports appearing in the print editions Friday.

I have almost 30 years under my belt in the sports department here. But instead of being jaded about starting another high school season, I'm finding an opposite effect.

I like to think it must have something to do with how I look at things, which I will attempt to illustrate via the sport I probably know the most about - swimming.

This summer, my close examination of the USA swimming rulebook produced a revelation.

In the long-distance events, it is permissible for the lap-counter to count down, instead of up - that is, to display the number of laps remaining, as opposed to the number of laps completed.

As a confirmed down-counter myself, I see this approach to be competely logical. But I found the discovery of the rule to be a jaw-dropper because in a lifetime of competing, reporting and now coaching, I've never once seen it happen in person.

Practically speaking, counters just always count up.

I guess it's not so very important in the longest of the high school races, the 500-yard freestyle. But in a much longer race such as the 1,650, I always found that the more helpful number was the one specifying the number of laps left.

For me, somewhere past the halfway point of that 66-lap race, the counting-up approach loses its pertinence and a number like 43 just starts to seem irksome, a snotty reminder that even though you've been swimming more than 10 minutes already, you're not even close to finished.

Far better, I think, to instantly know that you have "just" 23 laps left, which after all is only a little bit more than all those 500s you did in that one killer practice set just a month ago.

Counting down is more relatable and therefore useful in that deep trough of exertion, where most of the distance swimmers I know well have admitted that they have some pretty dark thoughts. I'm talking about fragmentary, oxygen-depleted ideas such as, "Is my suit tied?" along with "Why can't I feel my limbs anymore?" and "Is this what being in labor feels like?"

Semi-delirious notions such as these underscore the need for counters in the first place. After all, under normal conditions, I'd like to think we can all count to 66.

Now then, back to the notion of counting down being valuable.

I'm willing to concede that it comes down to how you prefer to look at things.

I'm of the view that the since the number of laps completed is always in the past, the number which measures them has less significance than the one which denotes how long it will take before you can finally stop swimming.

Someone who favors the traditional counting-up strategy might suggest to me that I sprint the first 4 laps of my 1,650 and then see how effective my precious counting-down method works. Point taken, because those last 62 would be brutal.

But it would be a mistake to blame this painful hypothetical exercise on a counting strategy rather than the real culprit, which would be poor resource management. So I might counter by saying something haughty like, "The past certainly informs the present but it doesn't construct the future - that part is up to each of us."

I have come to realize that this is also a good general approach to living. Whatever the challenges of the past were, they are most certainly in the past. What is ahead is what really matters, so staying positive about all those considerations is important.

Likewise, I think this is why the fall sports season is so special.

Another summer has come and gone, and here we are again, at the start of a school year ripe with possibility.

Let the countdown begin.

agabriel@dailyherald.com

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