Swimming is very different from other collegiate sports, perhaps more than any other sport.

There are several ways in which swimming is different from and similar to other college sports. Swimming can be compared to track and field, or even cross country, because success is determined based on times and improvement upon the competitor’s times.

However, swimming has many more differences than similarities between it and other collegiate athletics. Swimming plans their meets around their training blocks, where most sports schedule their practices and training around their schedule. This is done to provide the swimmers with solid blocks of training to improve their strokes and physical endurance and strength to maximize improvement throughout the course of the season.

Another difference between swimming and other sports is that the conference championship is the only competition where it really matters whether or not you score higher than your opponents.

The only requirement to make it to the conference meet in February is a school’s need to be in the conference to compete, whereas with most other sports need to qualify for their conference tournament to even compete for a title. And it isn’t even a matter of personal desire to beat the other team, there is just more of a need to use the meets as a measuring stick for the swimmers to see how much they have improved and how far they are from the personal goals they have for themselves.

In the conference meet, this all changes. The conference championship is, at that point, on the line, so everybody is going all out to beat the other teams.

This increase in competitiveness differentiates swimming from all other sports, because in other sports, the competition against conference opponents before the final weekend of the season counts toward the conference championship. But not in swimming.

In swimming, the team scores only matter once each year, so that one time every year that matter most becomes that much more tense. Swimmers look forward to this moment and anticipate it all year, waiting for their time to shine, their moment in the spotlight to help bring their school a conference title.

Other sports have several tense moments, but swimming manages to pack a season’s worth of intensity into one weekend.

That once-a-year chaos and ballyhoo is what sets swimming so far apart from other sports, and makes swimming so unique among not only sports but also college life in general.

Everywhere else, the tension and anticipation are distributed throughout the year, not pent up for one giant explosion like swimming.

So the next time you think that swimming is just another sport, think again.

Brad Kupiec can be reached at bmkupiec@eiu.edu