Club swimming - give it up?

[Limtim]

My daughter is 9. She's been swimming as part of a competitive swimming club since she was around 7 and is now training twice per week (1.75 hrs in total, spread over two sessions, going up to 2 hours next term finishing at 8.15 pm, so home by 8.45, bed at 9 pm). She swims because she enjoys it and because it allows her to take part in school swimming galas (she is also a member of the school swim squad which trains for 1hr per week, but their teaching is nowhere near as good). No other ambitions in swimming beyond this.

We are finding it difficult to fit in the club training on top of her long school days and her gymnastics which is itself time-consuming. It is costly and also takes up family time. However, I'm reluctant for her to give up swimming because it is a valuable life skill, it keeps her fit, and she wants to continue. She also has ADHD and exercise is beneficial. I wish I could find some kind of middle ground for her. Perhaps 45 minutes to 1 hour of high-quality swimming training per week outside of school, but it doesn't seem to exist.

For those with children who are maybe a bit older now - are you glad they continued with their swimming or glad they gave it up? Is it worth persevering perhaps until they are a bit older? I know these are very low hours of training, there just isn't a lot of spare time to play with. Thank you!

My dd is 12 and has been swimming for a club since aged 9.
She gets so much more from it than just swimming - has given her so much confidence for secondary school and has made loads of new friends. She loves the coaches and it is a social thing too. She isn't anywhere near the quickest swimmer but it is so beneficial for other reasons.

I was glad mine continued. As she enjoys it, I'd try to keep it going. (It is also an excellent activity for a child with ADHD.)

Mine are 15 and 12 and have swum with a club since 9 and 8 respectively. Swimming is amazing for all round fitness, they can generally do lots of sports pretty well just from their base fitness. I think the discipline of it is good, and there is an element of mindfulness to swimming that when you’re going up and down the pool and focusing on that it clears your head (I maybe haven’t worded that well!)
Having said that, I know gymnastics is a sport that demands a lot of hours so the two may be difficult to combine, and I don’t think recreational swimming is easily accessible at that age - our club does offer that, but aimed at teenagers.

Thank you, it's interesting to hear your thoughts. I think it has excellent benefits too. What format does the recreational swimming take at your club? Is it described as swim fit? She's probably too young for that but it's something to think about for the future.

In terms of cost, we pay just over £300 I think per term for 1.75 hours training per week. Does that sound reasonable?

Mine also continued, we’re another year down the line to you. I would stop in a heartbeat but she really wants to do it. It is usually 4 sessions a week and sometimes more before competitions.

Like pp I’ve found it’s given her other benefits, her school work is actually improving as she’s more focussed and she has a lot more confidence and a lovely group of swimming friends.

She won a national competition this weekend so no sign of it stopping soon. It has taken over our lives!

Our local leisure centre does a ‘stage 8’ class (ordinary lessons finish with stage 7) which is an hour long & really good quality teaching - attended by a mix of kids who had completed the stages but didn’t want to stop swimming - ages about 9 to 16. Might be worth asking for something like that?

It's an expensive and time consuming sport but I am glad my DD (16) has stuck at it. She's really fit as a result and had so many opportunities to build confidence through it.

If she's mainly about the fitness, technique and social side then just adjust her training commitments to suit. My DD does 1 hour of a 2 hour training session on Sunday evenings because she's not chasing down county times.

Mine stuck with it till she was 17 but really only enjoyed the training, she hated competing and the older and higher up the squads she got the more pressure there was to compete, she was lucky in that respect that covid intervened for a long time and a couple of minor injuries which meant she could train but not compete. Gradually though the gap between her and the competing swimmers her age got too big and was embarrassing, she dropped to swim fit but the sessions were alongside her old squad so still embarrassing. WRT ADHD, she is on a waiting list for assessment and a year after giving up completely she is struggling far more with her symptoms than she ever did before but won't swim at all, she doesn't feel motivated without a coach pushing her.

For the recreational swimming, they can either do one or two sessions a week. They train alongside another squad and the coach gives them sets - I assume slightly easier ones.

To me £300 a term sounds a lot for that amount, I think the lowest squads in our club pay around £40-45 for 3 hours a week. I guess area dependent though

If possible, do carry on. The impact of that swimming on her ADHD will be huge. I’ve got ADHD and exercise is the biggest thing that helps. The more the better, and especially hard cardio. Unfortunately, I have no sporting ability so i did nothing as a child. It’s a huge gift you are giving your dd.

£300 sounds like a lot. Our lower squads who are doing around that amount of training (up to 3 hours) pay £26 month. I would think that up to £40 is reasonable.

We have a squad for the over-12s which is only competitive if you want (so quite a few do it for recreation/keeping fit/having fun with their mates). They are really fit from it too.

How much gymnastics is she doing? I think you can really only do gymnastics or swimming seriously after a certain age.

Our local pool offers either club swimming as you describe or a rookie lifeguard program. We quite like the sound of the lifeguard club. It's for kids ages 8-12 and for once they have completed lessons.

https://www.rlss.org.uk/the-rookie-lifeguard-programme

It's only once per week and held in the afternoons at our pool about 5pm, maybe that will satisfy the being in the water but take pressure off family time.

Find a swimming club that has a club squad. That's what they're usually called anyway but you might have to enquire if they have a non competitive pathway. This is for kids who want to keep up the fitness but don't want to compete so it's nowhere near as demanding. My DD goes 4x a week for 1hr but you can do as few as 1x a week. She does do some galas.

£300 sounds like a lot tbh. A term is roughly 3 months if I'm correct? We pay £38 a month for 4hrs of training a week. No land training though.
My DD did rookie lifeguard at that age and enjoyed it but this was on top of swimming. She's due to train as a lifeguard this Easter as she'll be 16. It's a great skill to keep up, and lots of cheaper and less time consuming options exist. We're in London if it helps.

Thank you everyone. We've decided to do one more term at the club but take it at our own pace. So she will go if she can but not feel bad if she's too tired. We will then investigate alternative options. It is a lot of money but other clubs locally (south east) seem to be charging similar amounts (for instance £220 per term for 1 HR per week).

45-60 minutes swimming per week would be very little swimming!

How much time is she spending at gymnastics? Perhaps that could be cut down instead? Twice a week for less than/about 2 hours of swimming total isn't so much, so it's hard to see how it's cutting so much into your family time. Can't be that far away either if she's washed, dried, changed and home in 30 mins.

The swimming, as well as being a good life skill, is very good as a form of exercise, which is good for her general health, physically and mentally. I think more so than gymnastics!

This. They are 2 of the most time-consuming sports for younger DCs and incompatible if done competitively IMO.

Some leisure centres do a junior swim fit - that might work? Or asking other clubs about their non-competitive squads, as a PP suggested, although all the clubs I know will still have either a fairly late finish to evening practices or morning training with eye-wateringly early starts. We get all the anti-social slots when the leisure centre members don't want to use the pool!
If you leave her where she is with her attendance dropping, you may find she quickly falls behind others in her squad which will dent her confidence. I think it is decision time between swimming and gym, unfortunately. I would pick swimming - yes, I'm biased, but it is less cutthroat and more social before you start on the benefits to MH and sleep (especially for ADHD DCs). It is less damaging on the body longer term too and a great inclusive sport, as there are galas at all kinds of levels until you quit or die!

Oh, and I agree with PPs that £300 a term seems very expensive. Have you worked out how much you're paying per hour? I pay the equivalent of £2.37/hr for DC1 and £3.77/hr for DC2 currently. The hourly rate gets cheaper the more hours you do, with the top squad paying £1.95/hr.

Does a term count as 10 weeks? I've never known clubs to charge per term but by month. Even if a term is 13 weeks, it is a ridiculously high amount of money per month. Our club is not cheap but that's way higher than what our swimmers at that age pay.
That said, I think swimming is likely to last longer than gymnastics and the risk of injury in swimming is a lot less. The stress on the body is certainly a lot lower. Mine has been swimming at a club for quite a while and now trains 16 hours a week, including gym so it can be time consuming for us.

@SkankingWombat I agree that swimming is better than gymnastics tbh. I've found as DD got older she's made lots of friends from all over the home counties through galas and it's a much better gender balance than gymnastics. I think that really helps. If I could go back in time I'd put DD through something like hockey though as she's a bit heartbroken she just doesn't have the time to get herself to a level of swimming she wants to be at. It's much easier with other sports. I know land training has its place, but training in the water is not easily substituted.

If your daughter enjoys swimming and gymnastics, is there an artistic swimming club (synchronised swimming) near you?
That way she could maybe combine both interests into one club.