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Training is organised into four squads plus the 'Friday night group', and within each of these swimmers are ranked by lanes.
As you improve you will move up a lane within your group or squad. When you are at the right standard the coaches will invite you to join a squad, which may result in additional training sessions. At each level you will be keen to move up a lane because that shows how well you are doing.
Another way to see how well you are doing is to keep a note of your 'times'. As you start to take part in galas and league matches, you will record your times and note your PBs (personal best times) in each stroke and at various distances. In the early months, PBs are not important as you gain stamina and technique. But soon you will be making a note of how fast you can swim each event and comparing your time against others in the squad.
When you start to swim galas in 50m pools (long-course) as well as 25m pools (short-course), your table of PBs will expand as timings are not directly comparable between to the lengths of pool due to the number of times you get to push off the end. There are official conversion tables that give equivalent times, but don't worry about this until you start to swim in major competitions.
Beyond the PCSC squads there are District and National squads too, each with their own target qualifying times. More on this below.
There are a few small but important things to get sorted before your first session:
When you join PCSC you will be told when to come along for your first session. The key things to remember are:
There are only a couple of other bits of kit that you will need at some point:
The coaches will tell you which lane you are to swim in, and will tell you who is going to look after your lane. You may have one of the two Anns who have been coaching for a long time, or you may have one of the older swimmers, or one of the parent helpers. All of the helpers have either been on teaching courses, or have been swimming competitively themselves for a few years and they are there for three main reasons:
so you will need to listen carefully to what you are being told and then do as you are told! (It seems strange but some children are much better at this than others - at all ages!)
'Moving up a lane' is the first sign that you are improving your technique. The coaches have been watching how you are doing and will tell you that you can 'move up a lane' and will tell you which lane to swim in.
'Joining a squad' happens when you have shown that you have the strength and technique to move on to more training. The top squad is the A squad and they do about 9 hours of training a week! From top to bottom, the squads are:
Before long you will hear the term 'A Grade times' and wonder what it means.
Each year the Midland District publishes 'qualifying times' for all strokes,
distances and ages - these are called the 'A Grade times'. To enter the
Graded Championships for a particular stroke, you must not have swum faster than
these times. To enter the District Championships, you must have achieved a
time faster than the A Grade time for your age. It is possible for you to have
an A grade time for an older age group - which tells you that you are doing
really well. e.g. a 10 year old can see that they have achieved a 12 year old A
grade time.
You will also hear the term 'Age on the day' in relation to competitions.
To try and make it fair to all swimmers, competition age groups are set on a
particular day - usually the first day of the gala. This means that the
age group that you enter for is determined by how old you are on the day of the
gala. If it is your birthday on the day of the gala you must swim in the
older age group. e.g. on 7th June 2003 ER has his 11th birthday, and, as
it's the Stars of the Future gala that day he has to swim in the '11 year' age
group and not '10 and under'
Swimming in lanes does take some getting used to - especially for backstroke!
There are a few simple rules to remember:
Just swimming up and down doing the same old thing doesn't help you to improve, so the coaches have exercises or 'drills' to help you focus on one aspect of the stroke at a time. The drill may work on legs, or arms, or breathing - using floats or pull-buoy. Doing drill is important and effective because you only have to think about one thing at a time. Drill for squad swimmers may include speed work, repetitions of certain combinations of drills, dives, turns etc. The coaches work out the programme of drills for the night, which the poolside helpers then explain to the swimmers. The helpers also help keep track of what the swimmers have done - some of the older swimmers seem to have trouble counting repetitions for some reason!
I'm sure that you have more questions! Please email me and I'll address them and add them to this page, or tell you where the answer is webmaster@pcsc.org.uk