Christmas Bowling!

Please let me know if you would like to attend this Christmas social

Darren

Tough Swimmers!

Very tough swimming by Junior Development tonight, Fly until you die!

Well done to everyone that swam it, especially Eddie, Dan and Molly, who had to be stopped due to the end of their session, completing 1000m non stop fly!

Busy Weekend

Huge congratultions to the swimmers who competed in a range of competitions this weekend. It is fantastic to see representatives of Orion swimming technically good at Boldmere Open meet and fast!

Ian and I whizzed off to Rugby in the early evening to support the Novice gala compete.

This was a fantastic opportunity with lots of the team making their first competitive swims in an Orion hat, and I could not be more pleased!  With many swimmers 'swimming up', against older children, Orion did fantastic coming 5th out of 7. With some strong competition by a huge Rugby and Coventry squad, I was glad to provide an opportunity to reward the swimmers who train so hard with a representation for the Club.

Thank you swimmers, fellow coaches, poolside helpers and timekeepers for enabling this to go ahead. Most of all, THANK YOU to all parents for attending and supporting some of the first steps in your child's competitive swimming future.

Report to follow shortly.

County Qualifying Times

The County championships, Regionals Championships and National/British Championships are seen as the big events that lead the performance pathway for British swimmers. Age at these competitions will be classed as- Age as at 31st December. For next year, any child born in 2005 will be classed as a 10 year old, 2004 classed as 11 year old and so on. 

Please check to see if you are close to any qualifying times on any existing or new events. If swimmers have the 50's, go for the 100's too!

Qualifying times for this year do not have to come from GB rankings for 10/11 year olds, but they do for 12+.This highlights the fact that swimmers have to compete in Open Meets to meet the qualifying times, most galas will not not lead to eligibility.

http://www.warwickshireswimming.org.uk/images/championships/swimming/qts-2015-sc-v3.pdf

Commitment

Very impressed coach this evening due to the children's attendance and enthusiasm at a pool with no lane ropes! The children are still focusing on techniques whilst hopefully having fun too. With the big number of swimmers attending tonight, I only realised it was bonfire night upon seeing the smoke in the sky afterwards. A big thank you to all concerned when you manage to put swimming before other events.

Coach Darren

October Focus: Every breath you take.

The focus for October will be about breathing. 

Breathing in swimming is the one thing that you HAVE to do, but slows you down each time you do it! 

Ideally you wouldn't have to breathe when swimming, and this is why FINA introduced the 15m rule that we use today, as strong competitors found that they could win races by doing dolphin kick all the way underwater. The problem being not making it a very good sport for spectators!

The main ideas I want children to think about is smart breathing smart:

On Frontcrawl, rotate your head to the side, keeping your chin as close to your arm as possible
(See video below)

For Breastroke and Butterfly, try not to 'gasp' for breath; keeping your chin close to the water, exhaling in the water and breathing powerfully in for oxygen.

Coach Darren

Club Championships

Congratulations to all the swimmers at the club championships. Lots of swimmers achieved different things over this competition. Whether it be county qualifying times, club records, medals, first swims or pb's, I was really happy to see the hard work that the children do in training, pass over to technical improvements in their strokes. Well done Orion Juniors.