Swimming Camps

[ponyprincess]

My dd age 10 swims for a club, and wants to attend a swimming camp over school holiday with a friend from the club. Does anyone have any suggestions/experience with these? Ideally we would want something nearish London, but the ones we found so far are

Maximum Performance--they do day session near London but camps in Somerset
Kelly swimming college--Devon

Anyone have any experiences with these, or others?

are you looking for one day camps or a couple of days?

I have experience of these and I think they are more geared towards older swimmers.

You could look at surrey sports park/guildford swimming club - they run clinics over the hols, with high ratios of coaches to swimmers.

Thanks DwellsUndertheSink, that is useful to know. We were thinking of camps that ran over a couple of days, but wouldn't really out one-day camps. Is it your experience that residential clubs in general tend to attract more the older swimmers? Was your experience with them positive?

I will have a look at the surrey sports club, that would be a lot closer than the other options!

I disagree strongly with Dwells. Most participants will be in the 10-13 range. After that swimmers tend to be in senior Squads so committed to Club schedules.

Kelly is an institution and great fun. The school looks like Hogwarts they have a tuck shop etc. I was never too sure whether it helped the swimming but I'm not too sure that mattered. Standards of swimming also varied. So good, some not but they were divided into groups at the right level. Max Perf also fine. Facilities at Millfield are fab, and also apparently the food.

Thanks NeedMoreSleep, it is good to hear that you had a good experiences with both. They both look great on the websites but sometimes hard to judge only from that!

The Maximum Performance guys are great - really good coaches and the swimmers from our club who've been on their day-long sessions have thoroughly enjoyed it

10 might be a bit young for the Kelly College residential course but 12-13 year olds would be fine (and make up most of the participants)

I'm a Kelly swim parent and the coaches are lovely! PM me if you want any info!

An update... DD has gone to Max performance this easter and is loving it really great coaching and activities, and lots of younger girls. They are great as they post lots of photos of current activities on facebook, so feels like you see what they are doing!!! Might try others to compare next time but this one is really great