Competitive Swimming

[Sazzle1980]

Hi there, my 10 year old daughter has recently starting swimming for a competitive swim club. They have recently moved the timing of their Saturday morning session from 8.30 to 6.30 meaning we will have to be up at 5.30 to manage the drive to the pool. We think that this is unreasonable given her age and the fact that she is a beginner. Has anyone else had similar experiences?

children who start so early with morning sessions most of the times drop out just when they need to start intensifying their training (i.e. 13 years old)

Children often drop out at 13 regardless of training session times - secondary school studies, puberty, other sports or hobby commitments, not wanting to commit to the hours required to be competitive.

It’s a well known issue, particularly for girls (our club used to have a specific squad for girls aged 11-15 aimed at retaining them in the sport - and these were girls that were national champions).

At least among the London clubs I am familiar with, those early morning sessions tend to start only around age 13+ for the county level swimmers and above, not for the beginner squads.

That’s interesting i’d always assumed the madness on these threads was London due to more pool pressure than elsewhere making clubs harder to get into and sane training slots difficult to get. Your experience sounds exactly like mine.

Isn’t that exactly what she’s saying that the ones who train very hard young are more likely to drop out? The problem is that they have to maintain the level of training or they get slower. If you do less when younger you can improve to 13 without trying that hard in reality. Most of them arent and will never be county let alone national champions.

No - around age 13 is a big drop out point regardless of how much training these kids are doing, whether that’s a mix of morning and evening / weekend sessions or just evening / weekend sessions.

It’s usually not the case that those doing morning sessions are doing more hours, they are often doing the same amount of training hours but clubs have to use early morning slots due to limited pool time availability.

My point is also that it’s a particular issue with girls (puberty), hence a dedicated squad specifically focussed on girls and their needs, which was an NGB initiative to retain talented female athletes.