As we head back into the pool for another year, we need to remember our focus.

Swimming is a hard sport to be good at. It takes a tremendous time commitment and dedication to compete at the highest levels. For this reason, the initial attraction to the sport of swimming needs to be the pure enjoyment of being in the water. The ability for the athlete to accept ownership of the sport is directly related to how much expectation is put on them by coaches and parents. Too much emphasis on performance at an early age diminishes the enjoyment factor. The swimmers who stay in the sport over the long term tend to create this ownership early. They usually have caring coaches and supportive parents behind them.

The club model is based on a swimmer developing skills on a graduated basis as the swimmer moves through the group structure in the club. The NYAC program follows the premise that athletes need to focus on skill development at a young age and focus on training expectations once the proper technique is ingrained. The aim is to develop superior stroke mechanics at the outset so that later, the older swimmers can dedicate more time training to develop these skills towards race pace training. You have to master the fundamentals first so that later you have the ability to train at race pace speeds more often. You can't skip the first step. Our sport is about speed, but the difference that people need to understand is that it's not how fast the athletes are swimming, but rather how they are swimming fast.

In NYAC, we strive at the Intro level to take an athlete's natural inclination towards speed and build skills that are based around a solid foundation of kick and core body movement range of motions. By this we mean the interaction between kick, core body movement and limb velocities. This essentially lays the foundation for our sport: a swimmer develops power by optimizing the synchronization of stroke length and stoke rate.

This graduated model is taught at every level in NYAC. The sole purpose of the program is to get kids swimming at faster levels in training which requires a tremendous amount of aerobic fitness (endurance) and stroke discipline. It's a tough thing to change when you get kids coming up through the system who have not mastered core body movement and range of motion. This is also an ongoing process even with swimmers who have good fundamentals because their bodies are constantly changing and maturing which can throw off the swimmer's mechanics.

This aspect of the adolescent life also makes it very important not to specialize in one stroke. This is the reason why the NYAC program is IM based. We want to make sure that swimmers at all levels are developing the proper fundamentals in all four strokes. The focus on all 4 strokes also allows for a sense of accomplishment. Swimmers naturally gravitate to a stroke they do well in. When the improvement factor begins to slow down in the "favourite" stroke it's great to have another event that works too! Additionally the short events are fun but it eventually becomes hard to take off time if it's a 50 Free and it is highly stressful on a young swimmer's body. All roundedness is the way to go in a young athletes career. My experience is that very rarely does a swimmer excel in the stroke they started with. This is why kids' core events should be based around the 800 Free and 400 IM. Swim Ontario has implemented tough prerequisite times based on this philosophy. For example, your child will not be able to swim in Provincial Championships in their best events if they do not meet the prerequisite times for the 400/800 Free and the 200/400 IM.
(The formula is Provincial Standard + 9%)

If parents would like to read more about developing athletes, an excellent document that goes into more detail on this subject is the Parent's Guide to Long Term Athlete Development. It is available by clicking on this link: https://www.swimming.ca/ltad

My guiding principles revolve around being innovative, being challenging, being engaged, and being a supportive and caring coach to the athletes under my care. All NYAC Staff create their own guiding principles along these lines.

Murray Drudge
NYAC Head Coach