Dear Swim Team Parents-
I first would like to thank Coach Jon for his help, dedication and insight with regards to the Arden Park Dolphins. We will keep him in our thoughts and prayers and wish him and his family all the best through this difficult time.
As we must move forward with the 2008 Arden Park Dolphins Swim Season, your coaching staff would like to review the current program set forth.
As an update, during the first two weeks we evaluated the swimmers and grouped them by ability. As we move forward towards our competitions we now must start to teach, review and/or fine tune the basic four strokes of freestyle, backstroke, butterfly and breaststroke. Last week (April 14 -18) we focused on breaststroke. This week (April 21-25) we will be working of butterfly. The following weeks (April 28 – May 2 & May 5 – 9) we will be working on backstroke and freestyle. During these weeks we will not only be working on stroke technique, but will start to emphasize property starts and turns as well. At the beginning of each practice there will be a standard warm-up and depending on the age group there will be a group of sets before we work into our drills.
For most of the advanced swimmers, who may think that these stroke tuning sets are unnecessary or boring, we assure they are necessary. Through the repetitions of these sets we will be breaking bad habits and tuning individuals on the proper technique. We will always remind them, and you as parents should remind them as well, that there is always room for improvement. These sets may not seem very laboring, but the swimmers should appreciate the down time because there will be a lot of work and hard swimming in the near future.
We have had a few parents ask why the children swim laps when doing the drills instead of individually working with the swimmers who may have less skill than others. During the first two weeks we did do some individual work with small groups to ensure there conformability in the water. Now, as we move closer to the competition phase of our schedule, we must move on to group stroke training. Once school lets out we will have our morning clinics which will again be used to intensified technique training and instruction. The first and most important reason for lap swimming is because having the swimmer do a whole lap of drills gets their “repetitions” in. It is important, especially for our younger swimmers, to get used to swimming 25 yards every drill instead of 10 or 15 yards because they will be swimming 25 yards and not 10 or 15 yards in the meets. On the deck we will review the proper way to do the current drill we expect the swimmers to do. Once in the water the swimmer can copy what the coaches have shown previously. It is by using these “step by step” procedures to build into the proper stroke technique and a better overall swimmer.
During each practice we have individual technique instruction in the smaller part of the pool. Each time we do this we may be moving the swimmers around so each and every swimmer gets more personal instruction with the coaches. As a result we hope that this attention to stroke detail will continue throughout the season and the swimmers should see continued improvement. We do understand that some swimmers are “first time” swimmers and have very little clue on how to do the strokes properly. But with one coach working with a majority of the group while the other coaches work with them individually; everyone WILL show significant improvement.
We look forward to our continued work with your children and are enthusiastic about the upcoming competitions. Working with these young talented children is our pleasure.
Thank you,
Coach Troy Morris |
