Does anyone's child do club/competative swimming?

[IlanaK]

My ds1 is almost 8 and a very good swimmer. I was talking to his swimming teacher today about where he could progress to. He mentioned club swimming. Ds1 is too young at the moment, and his swimming is not quite ready, but I am thinking about it for the future.

Does anyone do this? Does it seriously involve 6am starts? How often do your children train? How old were they when they started?

Any info please?

My ds 1 who is 7 swims with the club, but not in the early session-his swimming is at the weekend, he can progress to the 5am start when he is about 9 i think.

He has swum with the squad since he was 2 as that is when they start teaching-bear in mind I swam with the squad as well.

Hmmmm....I think it is different here. The teacher said that the club chooses children based on their ability and they train three times a week.

Our club takes some from age 8, but most are still in lesson programme and join the prelim squad from about age 9, depending on stamina and skill.

Our club is not uber competitive and so takes "drop out" from the club that is. We have NO compulsory early starts, just choose from 2-5 sessions a week, after school or weekends. The Top squads have the choice of an early start, but no pressure (it is 7-8am).

For those that want to compete they can, if not you train and do the annual club gala races.

DS joined at age 10, was doing 3pw (and diving once pw) but after a back injury dropped to 2 sessions and the 3rd session is over subscribed so he just does 2 + diving.

My DS1 has been asked. He is 8 and a very good long distance swimmer. He was 'spotted' by a teacher at his school who is in the local swimmingclub and a few weeks later he was 'spotted' again by one of the adult coaches at the local swimming pool who was walking up and down the side of the pool as DS1 was doing some lengths.

We have said no because of the 6 a.m sessions and also because of my own wife's experience.

She did it as a child and she said it tends to be an obsessive trainng programme and she gave up because she got sick of it.

DS1 swims quite intensively every week with school and I think that is enough at this age.

Different swimming clubs have slightly different approaches. You can belong to the club and swim, but if you are selected to be in the squad then there are more fixed sessions.

I would look carefully at which hours the club swims for, and at what age. With the larger club ds1 would have been doing training from 7-8pm on at least one evening a week, which was too late for us given school the next day. We found another club which had better times for us. I think that they start ASA competitions from 9, but ds's school do a number of galas with other local schools, so ds1 (will be 8 in a few weeks) already "competes".

Ds1's swimming in the school squad includes a 7am start once a week; in general most of the boys train for 2 hours a week with school on top of their swim lessons (again twice a week), and then have one or two club sessions each week, so they are swimming on say 5 days a week.

Wow - well thanks for all the responses. It certainly looks like it varies from club to club so I will have to look into what the local ones offer more closely. My son is home schooled so does not do school swimming. He curently does lessons once a week.