Question: What will my child be doing at swim practice?
Answer: Swim team practice for beginners is designed to pick-up where basic swim lessons end. Your child should be able to swim one length of the pool on his/her front and one on the back. The style the child uses can be ugly and erratic, (we’ll work on that) but they should be past the level of panic and struggle. The coaches will evaluate your child in the spring to make sure that she is water safe for group training. The practice itself is a combination of group swimming lesson, endurance training and introduction to racing skills. The bulk of the time is spent on improving stroke technique. Eight and under children practice for 45 minutes; the older ones for an hour. Boys and girls practice together but race separately. Your child will be assigned to a lane along with kids of similar ability. Each lane or pair of lanes has a different level of practice difficulty. As your child progresses, he will be moved over to a lane with a more strenuous practice. After warm up laps of free style, your child will practice swimming drills for the majority of the practice. Each of the four swimming strokes is broken up into its components. Each stroke has a distinct arm movement as well as a unique leg kick. Swimmers practice the various kicks with the aid of a kick board, then combine it with the appropriate arm stroke. The coaches demonstrate what the whole thing should look like, then off go the kids to practice it. One of the tremendous benefits of children of different ages being on the same team is that the young ones can see how hard the older ones work in practice and how well they can swim. This shows them what they can accomplish if they stick with it. Also, during swim meets the young ones see how hard the older ones try to win and they learn to put forth their best effort. There is a lot of the best kind of peer pressure. It’s all unspoken. Your child will learn by example as well as by formal training. It is hard to find an environment more conducive to learning a sport, by children of all ages and abilities than the swim team. So come on! Get wet ! Join the team; have a summer bonding experience with your children, build your own arsenal of anecdotes and meet some great people. If your are even thinking about the possibility of signing up your new swimmer, let me know by email at smcbach@cs.com. We’d like to have an idea of how many new children we might have. We have to plan, you know?
Next month we will discuss what really goes on at summer swim meets; subtitled "The positive effect of Pepsi and Sweet Tarts on racing speed." Don’t miss it!