The Power of Partnership: Parents, Coaches, and Swimmers Working Together for Success
The Power‑Play of Parenting: Why Unconditional Love Beats All the Swim Drills
“When a swimmer knows they’re loved no matter the time on the clock, the pool turns from a battlefield into a playground, and performance follows.”
In episode #100, the end of season 2 of Heavy Or Not, The OG Swim Guide, we turn to a master, Wayne Goldsmith. His statement is the best advice ever delivered to any athletic family. He breaks down the essential partnership among athletes, coaches, and parents. This is the classic triangle. He explains why unconditional love and clear role boundaries are the foundation for a successful sports experience.
What you’ll learn:
The parent’s primary job: love, accept, and value your child unconditionally.
The three‑partner model: distinct responsibilities of swimmer, coach, and parent.
What a swimmer should focus on daily: training, nutrition, recovery, and effort.
Coach duties: technical leadership, speed/endurance development, race strategy.
Common role‑crossing pitfalls and how keeping boundaries intact fuels performance.
Building Character and Performance: The Essential Contributions Parents Make to Sporting Success
Subscribe to Wayne’s content. It is always brilliant!
Wayne Goldsmith’s Substack Link = https://substack.com/@waynegoldsmith
Join Coaches Mark Rauterkus and Ron Usher at the NISCA Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 23 to 26, 2026. Click for details and to register. https://www.niscaonline.org/index.php/conference/nisca-conference
Transcript: Heavy Or Not — Episode #100 (End of Season Two)
Mark Rauterkus
Heavy Or Not, episode 100, end of season two. Thanks for subscribing and sharing this podcast with your friends and team. This episode features Wayne Goldsmith, and I believe it is one of the most powerful video statements ever recorded.
Wayne Goldsmith
Hi. This is Wayne Goldsmith for the International Swimming Coaches Association. Not a day goes by where I don’t receive an email or a social media contact from a swimming parent somewhere in the world. A parent asking me how they can best support and help their child through their swimming career.
Most of the time the questions are very practical. Things like how many times a week should my child be training? When should my child specialize in a stroke or an event? Does my child need a particular diet to be a competitive swimmer?
When do they need to start their strength training campaign? How do they balance school and swimming, other sports and life generally? Most of the time swimming parents ask me questions which are very practical about things they can help their child do day to day to get better at swimming. It doesn’t matter where the question comes from, who the parent is, how old the swimmer may be, or what level that swimmer is swimming.
My answer is always the same. The job of a swimming parent is to love, accept, and value their child unconditionally, for no reason other than they are their child. Irrespective of how fast that child swims, what event that child does, how well that child performs, regardless of those elements, the job of every swimming parent in the world is to love, value, and accept that child for being that child, for being that wonderful, miraculous human being.
Parents are always looking for something that they can do to help their kids. It’s normal and it’s natural. It’s because we love our children so much that we want to do whatever we can to help them. I try to explain it in terms of a partnership.
I like to talk to parents in terms of a partnership between the swimmer, the coach, and the parent, where all of us as partners in that relationship work together in the best interest of helping that child to realize their full potential. Just like any partnership, it’s important that each of the partners plays their role and does their job to the best of their ability.
So what’s the job of a swimmer?
Quite simply, the job of a swimmer is to do everything they can to the best of their ability, to try hard, to give the best that they can, whatever that may be in and out of the pool. They take care of themselves, they eat the right foods, they drink plenty of fresh water, they get lots of sleep, they train to the best of their ability, whatever that may be on any given day.
What’s the job of a coach in the partnership?
To provide technical leadership, to help improve speed and endurance, to improve skills, to prepare the swimmer to race effectively, and to help them learn tactics and strategies for racing.
Now what’s the job of a parent in that partnership?
We already have discussed providing unconditional love, value, and acceptance. But what else?
To teach that child values: honesty, integrity, humility, courage, discipline, the importance of hard work, trust, and respect. To help them build their character. To teach them the importance of responsibility and accepting accountability for the things they do and don’t do. To help them evolve as human beings. To help them with their time management and also do all the practical things like helping them get to training on time and helping them learn life skills.
When you really think about it, the job of a parent in that partnership is perhaps the most important of all because it’s the parent, particularly with young kids, who’s responsible for developing, nurturing, growing, and supporting all those wonderful qualities that will sustain that child throughout their swimming career and throughout the rest of their life.
If the child understands that all they need to do is the best that they can do, if the coach does the best that they can as a coach, and the parent provides all the things that only they can provide, then that partnership flourishes. The child will love swimming, will enjoy the experience, and chances are they may perform very, very well.
Where I see things fall apart—and I often have coaches say, look, it’s so stressful dealing with parents—there’s a bit of a joke that goes around coaching that says what I really want is a wonderful swimming facility built next to the world’s largest orphanage so I can just work with kids, I can just coach, I can help kids to be all that they can be. That’s really not where we are now.
We want parents involved. We want them engaged. We want parents down at the pool. But very importantly, we want them performing their role.
Where things come unstuck in that athlete-coach-parent relationship is when people start to cross the line—when parents try to coach or when coaches try to parent. But where those three groups of people—athletes, coaches, and parents—understand their roles, understand how important each of their roles can be, and work together as partners in the performance and potential of that child, great things are going to happen.
This has been Wayne Goldsmith for the International Swimming Coaches Association.
Mark Rauterkus
Wayne Goldsmith has a Substack. It has more than 8,000 subscribers, and it’s golden. Everybody should subscribe to it. I do.
While you’re subscribing to his Substack, you might as well look for the Heavy Or Not one as well. I’d love to get one-tenth of the subscribers that he has. See the show notes for the links.
Now let’s talk a little bit about the next chapter of Heavy Or Not.
A great deal of content has already been gathered and we’re going to push out the episodes as soon as we can. But we had a wonderful event that ISCA hosted in St. Petersburg, Florida, with the Hall of Fame induction and the first ever ORCA Awards. Some of that content is going to be coming out in future episodes of Heavy Or Not.
In June I’ll be attending the NISCA conference. That’s the National Interscholastic Swim Coaches Association. In 2026 it’s in Grand Rapids. In 2027 it’s going to be in my city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I’ll be there. We’re going to have some wonderful content. You’ve got to be there. Water Polo and even OtterBall with Ron Usher are going to hit the spotlight, and we’re publishing another new book.
Fortune Set-up
Here’s today’s fortune statement.
Fortune Reader
When you start to observe yourself, then you start to control yourself.
Fortune Set-up
Sit with that for a moment.
Fortune Reader
When you start to observe yourself, then you start to control yourself.
Fortune Set-up
This isn’t something to rush past. It’s a thought to carry with you until our next episode. Ask yourself where this shows up in your training, your coaching, or your daily life. Then take it one step further.
Open a journal and write honestly about what it means to you right now.
This fortune statement comes from the book Mental Skills for Young Athletes, written by sports psychologist John Hogg, PhD from British Columbia, Canada. The book and the companion online course are available at SwimISCA.com.
Strong performance doesn’t start with talent. It starts with awareness. And awareness starts with one good thought at a time.