News For

SWIM  PARENTS

Published by The American Swimming Coaches Association

5101 NW 21 Ave., Suite 200

Fort Lauderdale FL 33309

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Developing Swimmers Progressively

We develop our swimmers progressively with great patience.  Winning is not an issue with our younger age groups.  We want swimmers to be their best in their later teen and college age years.  We spend the majority of time with our youngest swimmers developing technique, some time developing endurance, and very little time developing speed.  As swimmers become older and more skilled we increase the amount of endurance work, continue to develop technique, and introduce “race preparation.” Racing preparation means learning how to race more than it means high volumes of quality speed work.  At older ages and higher levels of skill the emphasis is on racing speed and competition while continuing to build long term endurance and continuing to refine technique and race strategy.

On the mental side we want the swimmers to learn to take responsibility for their own performance and to learn the importance and the thrill of meeting challenges straight forward.  We also teach swimmers to; learn to read a pace clock and understand time relationships; learn about setting goals and the relationship between work and achieving goals; learn that everyone on the team contributes to each other's performance; and learn a sense of control in pacing swims, sets, and practices.  Control allows for the highest levels of work without counterproductive out of control struggling.  We feel this learned sense of control is applicable to other areas of life as well.

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