This week's heat wave should kill my 7-year-old son's shivering attempts to cut out of swim team practice early.

During the first weeks of the outdoor season, swim team parents are obligated to keep a straight face while insisting to their whimpering children that they don't understand all this crying about the pool being too cold. (Even if you're not brave enough to dip your toes in the frigid lap pool for fear of recreating Leonardo DiCaprio's slow plunge from "Titanic," I've learned it's easier to sell this con if you at least shed the hooded sweatshirt and fleece jacket.)

In May, being a good swim team parent is all about offering gentle reassurances that practice is almost over and that the feeling will eventually return to the swimmers' toes and fingers. That's the easy part, weeks before the summer swim meets that pit neighborhoods against each other, fueling parents' heated arguments over whether the 12-year-old breast stroke leg of the winning relay touched the wall with one or two hands.

In a moment of weakness last summer, I agreed to volunteer as a stroke-and-turn judge for neighborhood swim meets. That meant taking turns with two other parents from our neighborhood swim team to stand poolside for several hours each meet, vigilantly looking to make sure every swimmer upheld the sanctity of the four main strokes as their forefathers intended.

Disqualifying an 8-year-old for a clumsily executed butterfly or breaststroke hardly takes and eagle eye. If you're a stickler -- a polite term for someone eager to lay the smack down on sloppy swimming -- you can flag at least one swimmer every heat.

One judge supervising our stroke-and-turn efforts at the Cary City Meet last July eventually questioned how we had gone several heats without disqualifying a single swimmer during the breast stroke races.

If you're inclined to be more forgiving, if you fall in the camp that everyone deserves a trophy at the end of the season and everyone deserves an 'A' for effort, then judging stroke-and-turn miscues require a slight hardening of the heart.

At a Tuesday night training seminar designed to remind summer volunteers the do's and don'ts of stroke violations, we were reminded that swimmers always get the benefit of the doubt if you're not 100 percent sure what you saw as a judge. Fair enough, but then there's the question of what do you do with the 6-and-under swimmers, the youngest competitors who in many cases are still learning how not to sink to the bottom of the pool.

It was agreed that those youngest swimmers deserve an extra benefit of the doubt in their attempts to recreate some facsimile of a frog-legged breast stroke. The sticklers in the room argued, however, that the only way to get them to learn the right way is to disqualify them every time they swim the wrong way.

Those same stickers 'tsk-tsked' at the returning volunteers who admitted that most times judges in their meets typically agreed to give the youngest swimmers a pass on most miscues.

You would have to be a real 'stickler' -- insert your own less polite term here -- to take any personal glee in DQing swimmers. But someone has to be the bad cop, unfortunately, if you're trying to run a semblance of a true athletic competition.

The most unfortunate part, however, has nothing to do with any squeamishness you may have in disqualifying one of your team's swimmers in a closely contested meet. Rather, it's your inability to DQ any of the parents crowding you poolside, wondering loudly how you missed that atrocious butterfly violation in Lane 3.

But that's why they made ear plugs.

Check out our other daily themes at TriangleMom2Mom:

MONDAY: Meet!
TUESDAY: Ask!
WEDNESDAY: Eat!
THURSDAY: Play!
FRIDAY: Out!

WEEKEND: Relax!