March madness isn’t limited to basketball, it is also swimming’s mad month for championship meets.

Our local county league holds its championships at the end of the month, and USA swimming hosts a series of tiered championships based on performance. I’ve been spending a lot of time around the “best of the best” swimmers and it got me thinking about how those kids got to that point.

I’ve been a coach for a long time and you’d think by now, I’d have the perfect recipe for success. Far from it. In fact, when I add my parenting experiences to my coaching ones, I’m less sure now of what ultimately makes a kid into an elite athlete than I ever was. I’ve seen plenty of super talented kids with exceptional work ethics flame out and I’ve seen kids who hardly ever come to practice have their moment in the sun. I’ve also become much less focused on creating the best swimmer that I can and more focused on helping an athlete to become the best person they can be.

One of the most important qualities I look for in an athlete is humility. A quote from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on the back of our team shirt a few years back. “Be humble. Be hungry. And always be the hardest worker in the room.”

Coming into practice knowing that you have room to improve is a huge step toward becoming a good athlete. As crazy as it may seem, I’ve worked with many athletes who think they have nothing to learn from a coach or from their teammates. If an athlete feels like they can learn nothing, they won’t be invested in practice or open to new information. It will quickly lead to a frustrating situation for both the athlete and the coach.

Being humble doesn’t mean that an athlete can’t enjoy their accomplishments, but it does mean that they allow themselves room to grow. Recently, a funny combination of events allowed A to compete in the finals of a pretty big championship meet. Ultimately, he came away with a 15th place. 15th place may not sound like a big deal, but considering that he wasn’t even supposed to finish in the rankings, and most importantly, his own time had improved significantly, he was happy with himself.

The best part for me, both as his mom and his coach, was when he said, I’m pretty happy with this, but next year, I want to do better. I put on the coach hat for a while and we talked about what he’s going to need to do over the course of the next year to achieve that goal.

As we talked, I let him tell me what areas he thought he needed to improve. Believe me, I know what his weaknesses are, and then some, but hearing from him what he thought needed improvement was a better gateway to where to start fixing problems, because I knew he was already invested in fixing those problems. Even though he had just literally swum the best race of his life, knowing that he can do better and wanting to do better makes him a much more coachable kid.

You’ll hear time and time again that “attitude is everything.” It really is. It can make or break the best athletes. A long time ago, I had a young girl bop into my swim practice. She didn’t know the first thing about competitive swimming, but from her first night at practice, I knew she was something special.

Years later, I still picture that first night at practice in my head and what sticks out most to me wasn’t her innate feel for the water, or the natural way she dove in and sprinted across the pool without a thought. What sticks out most in my head is the gigantic smile that she had on her face the whole time.

As I watched this young athlete grow and continue her swim career at a DI school and eventually compete at Olympic trials, that same smile was almost always on her face. No matter how grueling the practice, no matter how tough the race, she was in her element and happy to be there. Sure, she had setbacks along the way, but her great attitude never changed.

I coached another swimmer who had the same happy-go-lucky attitude, but her experience was much different. She was truly awful in the pool at first. But she kept coming back. One night, her mother approached me and said, “I’m sorry she’s so awful, I feel like she’s holding the rest of the team back, but she just loves coming here, and I don’t know what to do.”

For the record, the rest of the team just swam around her. She wasn’t holding them back at all. I even faced pressure from the head coach of the team to cut her because she was that bad. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t turn away a kid who loved to swim that much, no matter how terrible she was.

It took many years, but she stuck it out, and finally toward the end of her high school career, it paid off, and she ultimately went on to place at the state swim meet and do very well for herself. Later, when I talked to her as an adult, I asked her why she stuck with it for as long as she did. She told me that she loved swimming, the winning was just a bonus. I don’t know about other coaches, but I’d take an entire team made up of kids like her over a talented kid with a bad attitude any day.

As we head into baseball season, or track season, or spring soccer, or whatever sport comes next for our young athletes, I hope they walk onto that field full of humility and passion. If they are ready to learn and improve and they love what they do, success is just around the corner.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.