Poolside Chat: parents of competitive swimmers

[2ducksandI]

Seems I managed to fill the other thread with talk of taking fridges to away galas! And I didnt even mean a fridge I meant an electric cool box So I've started another thread. Hope you all find it.

In the city ds swims the learn to swim programme attached to his club trains at the school pools not at the leisure centre - I think for same reason!

It's a 50m pool and the boom is up they have lessons down one end attached to the centre and the swim club have the other end. Not every night - some nights we have whole pool and should do LC training but the booms is broken 🤦🏼‍♀️

In other news - ds managed to smash his 100m free time this evening in training and did his first sub 60!!! He's buzzing

@itsgettingweird thats fantastic well done mini weird 👏

We don't have a learn to swim part of our club you pretty much need to be able to swim 25 metres to a decent ish standard before you start but our juniors coach tries to recruit kids from watching their school swim lessons or the leisure centre lessons but he is having a really hard job as covid has meant a lot of kids around 8/9 years old are not where they usually would be in terms of ability

In other news - ds managed to smash his 100m free time this evening in training and did his first sub 60!!! He's buzzing

That is truly amazing 🤩 well done to him.

We use one school pool but again can't get it in the after school slots as they have another, private swim school using it. We used to have learn to swim at 2 of the 3 council pools we use but can only use one now and as our club covers a large geographic area (3 towns) we are effectively only recruiting from one of the towns now. Unfortunately its not the most central of the 3 either. Our development and performance parents do a LOT of driving between the three towns. Its interesting hearing how others manage.

Pool set ups are definitely town/city /area dependant.

We live in a town. The town club uses a local school, and 2 town leisure centres.

The adjacent town has 1 leisure centre and they also have use of a school.

The city club we now swim at has the leisure centre and 2 school pools, use of a military pool facility and a new pool was due to open this month but is now out back until summer and we have already for use of that. It's attached to the uni.

The club he's now at in the city has good swim session times 5-7am and pm. Land training is 7-8pm. However it does make it hard for some as 5pm swim times means you need either 1 non working parent or one who has hours that fit (I'm a LP but work in education so I can manage it).
The other clubs have 7-9pm sessions sometimes for older swimmers and less morning training which means it works out but that's quite late. But I think for some families the timings are better.

Ideally though with what's available locally if your child wants to go above county level and competitive at counties you need to join a city club in any of the big cities around here.

So in essence there is something for everyone locally dependent on what you want from the sport. It's just to get regional and national level and sometimes British champs you do need (at some point) to move to a bigger club. I guess that's similar everywhere?

@itsgettingweird

Sub 1 min 100m - woohoo!

I ran a swim school providing lessons to 750 children using council pools - the council had given up running lessons and left it to the swim clubs to organise. The swim clubs did such a good job that the council decided they’d take the lessons back, so cancelled our pool time and we had to hand over the children on the books and our staff. We kept the top 100 or so by making them British Swimming and Club members, so that we could keep feeding the promising swimmers into our squads.

I’m still furious about it. I’d grown the numbers from 200 swimmers and had built a team of 60 staff. The council were a little surprised that I didn’t want to go and work for them (it was hard not tell them to go fuck themselves).

Abbott that's a disgrace I did laugh at them being surprised you didn't want to work for them!
They just saw ££££ signs

Good luck to everyone at counties this weekend wherever you are in the country!!!

Ds has already swam 2 events whilst I'm at home watching it on live stream!

Yes, good luck to you all, DD isn't swimming but I do feel a bit nostalgic for the days when she could be persuaded to attend the occasional meet 🙄.

We had a lie in this morning; just a couple of races this afternoon. It felt really odd driving down in daylight.

A National Trust property beckons!

We drove up in dusk at 7am and just got home in dusk!!!

Ds had a brilliant day. 4 races (50/100m free, 100m back and 200im - multi classification) and 3 pbs. One race on his pb pace (0.4 out but in a 50m)

County champion in all 4

Back tomorrow for 100m fly and 400m free!

Congrats to mini weird!

Well done mini weird that's great 👍
DS is at a normal gala this weekend, counties is next weekend, he is in a bit of a slump and hasn't beaten any of his PBs since setting them in October not helped by all his friends of the same age smashing their PBs on a regular basis. I guess this is where we will see how resilient he is.

Hello PBs are dependant on so much. Even just the distance (Eg 50m vs 200m can matter).

So the way the body changes, what they've been doing in training, where in the training cycle you are, are you rested.

So my ds had 4 races.

You tend to see a pattern of a PB - hang around that speed for a period - then PB - then ah g around the new time etc.

And also bare in mind that if he's racing a lot (fro example he's doing 2 weekends this month) they pb less.

The last time my ds swam LC (or even at a meet full stop) was nationals in December!

Well done to weird jnr.

There were lots of kids missing from the schedule today (hopefully not because they are all ill).

I rather like the idea of having a break mid-counties. Or perhaps it just makes things drag on.

I'd have to look through old reports, but my gut feel is that there were far fewer entrants this year. I suppose lots of the 10/11 year olds simply haven't had the opportunity to race to qualify (I know our junior squad has struggled to get kids interested in Open Meets).

I'd have to look through old reports, but my gut feel is that there were far fewer entrants this year. I suppose lots of the 10/11 year olds simply haven't had the opportunity to race to qualify (I know our junior squad has struggled to get kids interested in Open Meets).

If its anything like our counties they have set really hard qualifying times for the 10/11 years olds. My DS is 11 and has qualified for 7 regional events but just 1 County event.

@Hellocatshome

I'd have to look through old reports, but my gut feel is that there were far fewer entrants this year. I suppose lots of the 10/11 year olds simply haven't had the opportunity to race to qualify (I know our junior squad has struggled to get kids interested in Open Meets).

If its anything like our counties they have set really hard qualifying times for the 10/11 years olds. My DS is 11 and has qualified for 7 regional events but just 1 County event.

Our county is usually one of the hardest! Our times are fairly close to regional usually.

However this year they set quite normal/expected auto times and the consideration were really slow - but still limited the numbers to between 15-20 in the sprints and as low as 8 in distance for each age group.

They abolished qualifying times for disability swimmers! But think all the current ones in our county would have qualified anyway as they were all at nationals!

Because we incorporate the swimmers from the Channel Islands they have to set tight auto times so those who qualify know they'll qualify and can sort flights and accommodation etc.

@itsgettingwierd I wish we had consideration times, we just had qualifying times so some events for some ages have only 2 kids competing.

We've always had auto and consideration. The auto this year meant in some races only top 2 qualified automatically and they allowed a relaxed consideration to fill the spaces not knowing where swimmers would be after covid.
Think auto usually aimed at where top 10 would be expected to be. They are adjusted annually.

That seems very harsh and not really worth putting in a competition if there's only 2 swimmers in an age group! Those who have been close don't then get the chance to perform and the training cycle will have them ready to perform iyswim?

Well we are just getting ready for day 2. 100m fly and 400m free today!

Out of curiosity I had a look at 2020 and 2022. QT are actually the same (at least for the girls). However when checking today's races a lot less (about 1/4 less) competing this year.

Out of curiosity I had a look at 2020 and 2022. QT are actually the same (at least for the girls). However when checking today's races a lot less (about 1/4 less) competing this year.

Covid has a lot to answer for

I don't think Somerset changed times (they sometimes fiddle with longer fly races). We were able to enter based on any licensed meet time and you could enter an 800 or 1,500m if you had achieved a 400m QT.

We also seem to have a lot of events where there are very few swimmers, sometimes just one in an age group! If you can swim up and down for 20 minutes+ you are pretty much guaranteed a medal in the 1,500m this morning.

Good luck to everybody still competing.

It does.

We have filled all races. Dependent on age group it's top 15-20 for 50/100's and for 200's it's usually 10-15 and fly it's less and long distance it's 8!

But having looked closer I see we are the same as someone mentioned above and out 10/11 yo age group didn't have the number of swimmers compared to capacity. I'm not sure if that's not making consideration times (but they were really relaxed!) or as mentioned they haven't competed before due to covid as meets start age 9.

It's such a shame but swim England and I'm sure other Uk countries are really pushing to get it built back up.

I know here they started higher level (regional festival of swimming) comps last July but not anything county level. And of course winter nationals went ahead as usual (well as normal as comps are atm!)

Just had a look at 50 Free girls on Meet Mobile

In 2020 41 heats (318 swimmers)
In 2022 28 heats (214 swimmers)

At £6/entry, that is a hefty loss of income.