mums of swimmers

[emat]

It's hard to know if I'm posting in the right place.
Dd is 6 (she'll be 7 in May) and is a good swimmer. She learnt how to swim quite late (when she was 5) but the day she learnt she was swimming head down, front crawl the width of the pool. Shortly after that she started swim lessons and in the last year and a half has got good very quickly.
She is very competitive and has been saying that she would like to do swim competitions. Unfortunately there aren't any that she can do unless she joins a club. Joining a club scares me slightly because I think she's young to get into something that requires 'training' a couple of hours a week but I emailed a local club and they take them from age 7. She said that if dd wanted to try out then she would have to be able to swim a length (25m) front crawl with correct breathing and be able to do the other 3 strokes reasonably well, although not so much butterfly. I asked dd if she'd like to do the try out and she said 'yes' straight away even though she probably wouldn't be joining for another 6 months.
So my questions to any other mums who have children who are in swim clubs are:

Is the club situation one that's better suited to older children?
Are the competitions 'dog-eat-dog' or are they seen more as fun?
Do other children in the family suffer if one is in a club and the other isn't?

thanks in advance

emat, can't answer your 3rd question as I have 1 child, but my dd joined a swimming club at the age of 6 and the competitions were very much fun and all the children enjoed them. Now she swims for her school and trains twice a week at school.

Message withdrawn

My kids have both been after joinig the swimming club ,dd1 more so she can swim more days and dd2 because she is a fish,BUT its 6.30-7.30 ish on a school night so Dd1 would be no good and don't think it is fair to take dd2 without her (if that answers your 3rd ?)
Although dd1 has been to things before without dd2 just because dd2 wasn't old enough.
Our local club seems to be run similar to Snorkles, more lessons for the younger ones then competing later on.
Think swimming does take up time at w/es when they are in competitions so if she was going to carry on you'd have to think about that.

i swam competitively for a few years but was older than your daughter when I started. My experience was that it was more on improving on your own times - yes, there is a winner of the heats etc etc, but you're always wanting to get a personal best. i loved it

thanks for all your words of wisdom! It's been really helpful. It's nice to hear that the competitions aren't too serious at this age. I do worry slightly about how it'll affect ds (4) but he's a better swimmer than she was at the same age so I think it will be a family sport in time.
I used to swim in competitions when I was younger too but as part of a tetrathlon team.
I'll let you know how she gets on tomorrow anyway.

well... dd tried out this evening for the club and is good enough to join. I had thought she'd only have to do a couple of lengths but ended up doing 15 lengths of a 33m pool. I asked if I could take her out then because I was sure she'd be exhausted and she was furious with me because she'd loved every minute of it and wasn't a bit tired.
But seeing her swimming up and down this evening I thought that I would leave her for another 6 months in the lessons she's in and let her join a club when she at an age closer to the others. I think it'll be easier for her to make friends like that.

Brilliant