KIDS SWIM UNIVERSITY
Welcome to our website! It will look rather humble at first, but the goal for this project is sustainable growth; The more funds we acquire through your support, the more empowered we will be to improve your resources!
There is a widening gap in aquatics education that can be extremely challenging to bridge through traditional means.
While many community service organizations do a fantastic job providing both access to pools and as many swim lessons (and other aquatic programs) as they can muster the staff for, there are some realities that eventually catch up with aquatic program providers and limit their ability to focus on outreach opportunities.
For a brief overview of these challenges, please click here.
How aquatic program providers choose to meet these challenges impacts their communities differently.
With the pressure to establish and maintain a return on investment so high, when times are tough, low-revenue programs are either the first to go or get funded by higher revenue programs.
Putting the squeeze on staffing is also a common decision.
(In fact, I had to take an entire year off working in aquatics before I could recover from that vicious cycle enough to start this project.)
Already interested? Click here.
Still skeptical? Read on.
The following are free resources from reputable learn-to-swim organizations.
There are, of course, any number of less reputable free resources as well, but I won’t go into them, since you can use a search engine to find them anytime you’re curious.
Consider, in general, any skill that you want your child to develop: What’s the biggest difference between your kid and the next kid?
You probably already guessed it: Resources and practice. As a long-time swim instructor, I can confirm this is true. (It’s no different for adults, really.)
We’ve already discussed access to pools and lessons. It can become quite expensive for both participants and the organizations hosting these resources. What happens between lessons is crucial. I had a manager that put it this way:
If you put your kids in piano lessons, what do you expect them to do between lessons?
Practice.
If you put your kids in swim lessons, what do you expect them to do between lessons?
When you have a piano at home, it’s easier to meet expectations. But most parents who enroll their kids in swim lessons don’t have a pool at home. It can be quite the excursion to make a trip to the pool between lessons. Most parents don’t make the effort to bring their kids to practice and/or their local pool doesn’t open up for unstructured swimming at convenient times. (There are many other equally legitimate reasons too, but we can talk about those in another article.) Let’s address the two categories we have so far:
First, let’s pause and give credit here for simply giving your child additional opportunities to experience an aquatic environment. (Good job, parents!) There’s certainly a lot they can learn on their own from trial and error exploring the pool on its own.
From there, we can ask: What kind of practice do they get? Is it guided? Is it structured? What do you encourage them to focus on? Do you know how to make gentle corrections?
Most kids who practice on the piano at least have a plan, whether it’s sheet music to follow (stroke), scales to run through (drills), or even ear training (mirroring). Most kids who practice on the piano also have parents who are not tone deaf, so it’s relatively easy to identify when something isn’t played correctly. Swimming can be a little different in this regard. There’s nothing more awkward to an instructor than seeing a well-intentioned parent encourage improper technique in their kids’ swimming.
We can help provide the tools for parents to guide their children’s practice time and teach their kids how to swim!
Already interested? Click here.
Still skeptical? Read on.
Knowing how to swim well isn’t the only skill needed to make a good instructor. Most live instructor certification courses cost hundreds of dollars, especially by the time all the prerequisite costs are added in. Most live instructor courses are also very long, at inconvenient times, and are offered infrequently. Examples of things we would like to develop and offer:
With everything available in electronic form, you can get the information you need when you need it and as often as needed.
Of course, developing these cost money, so it is our intention to gauge interest for each of these products and use the funds from the eBooks to fund their respective video series. To give you all a taste of the quality of information we would be making available, it would be our pleasure to publish free swim tips periodically to garner support for the cause! To sign up for our mailing list, please click here.
Are there things you can do when you have to miss a practice session at the pool or if you can’t get to one between lessons (or at all)? Absolutely! Even though there’s a distinct difference between how one responds around or interacts with actual water, we don’t need actual fires or earthquakes to host fire drills or earthquake drills. Examples of things we would like to develop and offer:
Again, with everything available in electronic form, you can get the information you need when you need it and as often as needed. And it is our intention to gauge interest for each of these products and use the funds from the eBook to fund the development of the video series. For a taste of the quality of information we would be making available, please join our mailing list!
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