Our school coach really wanted our team to be closely bonded, but its a far from becoming reality.

As a club swimmer,  in order to do well, I have to work hard every single day for a long period of time. It is a big commitment, and literally is my life right now. Non-club swimmers (just on the school swim team) aren’t super committed to the sport, and they don’t practice as hard as we club swimmers do.

Our club coaches always want us swimmers at their practices, because club coaches are more familiar of our strengths and weaknesses, and do a good job on making practice challenging. This means that I’m usually lucky if I could go to school swim practice once per week, because of the meets that club+school swimming has.

Even when I do go to school practice, we are merging the club swimmers with non-club swimmers. Like most sports, club swimmers are much better at the sport than non-club swimmers. However, in swimming, the gap is enormously huge. So our school swim coach has to make the intervals slower to accommodate non-club swimmers and/or to put them into separate lanes, which completely separates the team.

Another thing is, when we go on team outings, we are still separated. Since our school swim team is mostly comprised of club swimmers, the club swimmers tend to talk with each other and not with the non club-swimmers (and even in our club swim team we talk in separate groups).