As Washington struggles to overcome polarization, a local swim league has quietly preserved and passed on the habits that hold Americans together.
Walking through my childhood neighborhood in Mosby Woods, I am struck less by what has changed than by what hasn’t.
The trees are taller now. The traffic on Route 66 is louder, buffered by a sound wall that wasn’t there when my parents moved here in 1967. Only a few have modified their split levels. The carport my dad built onto ours is still there, as are the green siding and shutters.
I’m was there because on July 25, Mosby Woods was hosting the last swim meet of the season: Division Eleven championships.
Just minutes from the U.S. Capitol, at pools all over Northern Virginia, parents began appearing in blue shorts and white shirts, the required uniform of meet officials. Volunteers flagged cars, made name tags, organized ribbons and timer cards, and started the concession grills. Coaches gathered athletes ranging from ages 5 to 18 for warmups.
At nine o’clock the announcer stopped the pop music, welcomed the teams, announced lane assignments, and quoted from the handbook: “The Northern Virginia Swimming League was founded in 1956 to develop a love for the sport, advanced aquatic skills, teamwork, and the principles of good sportsmanship.”
A child sang the National Anthem. Hundreds of swimmers and parents turned toward the flag, hands over their hearts.
Every Saturday from the beginning of June through the end of July, some version of this happens at more than one hundred neighborhood pools across Northern Virginia.
Washington is often described as America’s most politically polarized city. Yet every summer, in the suburbs surrounding it, more than seventeen thousand children and tens of thousands of parents participate in something almost entirely untouched by politics: the Northern Virginia Swimming League, or NVSL.
I’ve been wondering why.
I grew up in this league. My parents spent summer Saturdays starting or timing races, judging strokes, filling out ribbons, and cheering on their neighbors’ children. Fifty years later, I returned as a parent expecting many trips down memory lane.
Instead, I found continuity.
For eight weeks each summer, neighborhoods organize themselves around a shared purpose: children learning to swim, compete, and lead.
On our team, the little ones begin as “Mini Sharks.” By age 12 or 13 they are helping coach them. Teenagers become assistant coaches. Seniors organize fundraisers, lead traditions, and become giants in the eyes of the 6-year-olds who follow them around the pool deck.
Only as a parent did I realize that, like me, these children are learning more than swimming. They are building the muscle memory of citizenship.
Alexis de Tocqueville marveled that Americans were forever forming voluntary associations. Long before we asked Washington to solve problems, neighbors figured them out together. We built churches, schools, charities, civic clubs—and sports leagues. These institutions became the habits of a free people.
Founded in 1956 with just 11 teams, the league grew through the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, recessions, riots, and the COVID-19 crisis. I hear that the cultural revolution was meant to “liberate” women, and men, from family responsibility. Around here it seems to have passed us by. Perhaps institutions like the NVSL are marks on the lintel.
The adults don’t just volunteer; they model civic duty. Children watch parents organize meets, settle disagreements, congratulate opponents, and quietly do unglamorous jobs that no one notices unless they aren’t done. They learn that communities aren’t inevitable. The Good Society is built, one Saturday morning at a time, by ordinary people willing to contribute, compromise, and work their tails off.
Also remarkable is who buys into these neighborhoods and swim clubs. Laboring at our grill this summer were dads who grew up in other parts of the world working shoulder to shoulder with men whose forebears have lived here for generations.
With many transplanted to Washington from around the nation and world, it’s not so much about losing your identity than gaining a shared one. By the end of every summer, the newcomers are veteran Shark families.
The founders of the NVSL also understood something fundamentally American: how to integrate individuality and community through competition. Seven years after the league was founded, NVSL introduced All Stars. Winning mattered. Breaking records mattered.
This summer Shark swimmers recorded 479 personal bests, broke nine team records, and dropped nearly eight hundred cumulative seconds from their race times. As a timer, I often saw a 9- or 10-year-old boy’s excitement for a teammate who dropped time, even when he added to his own.
That balance is one of the league’s triumphs—and one that must be stewarded by each generation.
In the league’s highest division this summer, parents heatedly debated whether elaborate pre-meet theatrics crossed the line from enthusiasm to intimidation. I find these arguments reassuring. The league remembers are asking whether it is still teaching the virtues of sportsmanship.
Perhaps this is why this league has endured for 70 years while so many American institutions struggle to hold people together. Every volunteering parent wears a white shirt and blue shorts. No team insignia allowed. At least in the divisions where I’ve served, no one talks politics on the pool deck.
When I watched the annual senior slideshow this summer, I cried more than I expected. Every graduating swimmer appeared first as a 5-year-old in goggles too large for his or her face, then matured through awkward adolescence into confident young adults heading off to college.
I wasn’t crying simply because they had grown up, or because next year my oldest will be in that slideshow. I was overpowered by the goodness, and greatness, of it all. The NVSL of my nostalgia was surpassed by the league living in the people crowding into our community center.
America’s founders understood that free people require virtues every bit as much as laws. The founders of the NVSL got this, too. Their purpose was not just to produce faster swimmers. It was to “develop a love for the sport, advanced aquatic skills, teamwork, and the principles of good sportsmanship.”
Like every human institution, individuals in the league occasionally forget that purpose. But unlike many institutions today, it still remembers where to find it—in its founding principles.
Americans would do well to remember the same thing.
