CIS Stroke Camp

I love working with kids and especially being able to give back some of my knowledge and passion about swimming back to them. Definitely one of the benefits of being a professional athlete is having young swimmers look up to you and the opportunity to inspire, encourage, teach, and motivate them to be better swimmers and better people.

During the CIS weekend in late February, I was involved in a stroke camp for young kids aged 10-14. We had a great turnout of about 100 kids from all across Alberta, but mainly from swimmers in the Calgary area. We ran the stroke camp on a Saturday afternoon right before the last night of finals of the CIS Championships of University Swimming where the Dinos brought home the team title in both the men and women’s divisions.

We split up into four groups where a local coach was paired with an elite swimmer to demonstrate. The four stations were breaststroke turns, backstroke starts, back to breast turns, and underwater push-offs. I was in the underwater push-off/ kick off the wall station with 3-time Olympian, silver medalist, and now coach Tom Ponting and worked with Lindsay Delmar who is a swimmer on the Racing Group with me at UCSC that I train with who is one of the top 200 free and 200 flyers in the country.

The pictures below show a little glimpse of the event. The feedback we got from the parents was really encouraging to hear afterwards as well. It is always an honor for little kids to look up to you and it is something I always love to be apart of. Hopefully some of the kids will have better streamlines and underwater kicks off the wall, but also that they will be encouraged to have fun in swimming and pursue their dreams too. I often look back at my swimming career and think about certain athletes along the way who helped inspire me to be the swimmer I am today.