It was the last day of cuts for the Boys Swim and Dive team my freshman year. I was swimming in my lane, excited to finally have graduated from the town team and to be practicing alongside a team full of fresh faces. Beneath the roar of flailing limbs and crashing water, I barely made out the coach yelling at me to switch lanes: more precisely, telling me to move to a lane with a lower speed. We were in the middle of swimming a set of many different strokes, and I said I’d switch later. When the set was over, I moved over the instant he barked at me to move again. As the practice ended and the rest of the team retired to the locker room, I was summoned to the side of the pool, where I was promptly cut from the team.

This one experience, taking place over the course of less than an hour, forever changed my relationship with swimming, my favorite sport. It destroyed my self-esteem; the coach remarked while cutting me that I was “taking up too much space on the team.” I didn’t swim for months, completely consumed by the thought that the sport I had identified most with, and a team I wanted nothing more than to identify with, had been taken from me. Now that I’m a senior, a summer lifeguard for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, and on the roster for Vassar College’s Swim and Dive team for the next season, I want to propose ways that could help stop this from ever happening again to another student.

Cutting is a complicated concept. On one hand, freshman teams and some junior varsity teams should be where younger students who are new to the sport are placed. These teams act as spaces where newer players learn and grow. On the other hand, these teams have budget constraints and outside pressures to focus resources on the top athletes who can bring in more acclaim and press through winning titles and getting recruited to top college programs. So how should we fix the cutting process?

A simple answer that could really change the whole system would be an overall expansion of credit-compatible intramural sports teams. If the varsity team of a sport is highly competitive, and the junior varsity team is a way of preparing talent for the varsity team, then having an alternative for those just wanting to play the sport for fun while also getting wellness credit would be a great option.

Another possible solution is a greater expansion of empathy for freshmen in the cutting process. This could be through a general expansion of freshman teams, or, more radically, making it so freshmen can either not be cut or putting a small cap on how many freshmen a team can cut.

From my own experience, I can say that being cut as a freshman is particularly devastating. Being new to high school is chaotic, and a sports team can act as an opportunity to make friends, a schedule stabilizer, and, very importantly due to the increasingly competitive nature of college applications, as an extracurricular and personal passion. Being denied that opportunity while being so new to high school is the cruelest form of selectivity and takes away the opportunity to grow.

Athletes, specifically freshmen, who are most at risk of being cut, don’t need rejection. They need a helping hand to see if, when given the opportunity and adequate resources, they can step up and truly improve as athletes and teammates. Sadly, these reforms might never happen, as teams with talent might continue to act as hopeful incubators for top recruits that give many resources to just a select few. Equal distribution is a fantasy, but leveling the starting line is a worthy goal.