Just suppose...

...we use some easy numbers to see what a little time off, here and there, turns into over the course of, say, a thirty-two week season.

Maybe your team spends an average of twenty-two hours in the water each week (11 workouts @ 2 hours each) and three hours on dry-land work. That's a total of twenty-five hours weekly over thirty-two weeks for a season total of 800 hours (I love easy numbers!).

I've heard of this thing called "taper" when teams might not train quite so much, but let's assume there are some weeks (Christmas training?) that would help it all even out.

If you knock off fifteen minutes early in three of those workouts each week, you've punted nearly a week of the season's training. Don't trust my math? Three quarters of an hour per week for thirty-two weeks is 24 hours.

If you get the kiddos out fifteen minutes sooner than scheduled six times per week, your thirty-two weeks of training shrinks to just over thirty weeks.

Suppose an athlete misses the first fifteen minutes of workout eight times each week. That adds up to one two-hour workout missed each week.

Now, what if you have a bunch of lollygaggers that get in fifteen minutes late in each of those eleven water workouts? On top of that, what if the coach gets the team out of the water fifteen minutes early for one practice per week.

That group would lose three hours of training per week. Over the course of a thirty-two week season, that'd be ninety-six hours down the drain. That's like losing nearly four weeks of the season, right?

It might not pay to allow your team to be a bunch of lollygaggers: