MoCo: Advanced lessons, SwiMontgomery, stroke & turn?
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Anonymous
| What is the difference between the advanced swimming lessons through Montgomery County at the county pools, versus SwiMontgomery, versus stroke & turn? It looks like the requirement to qualify for each of them is basically the same (be able to swim 25 yards.) What are the kids actually doing? Is it the same in each of them and the differences are most just the timing/frequency/etc of the lessons? Or are they different? |
Anonymous
| We found SwimMontgomery and Stroke and Turn pretty similar. They are basically pre-team, not a lot of actual lessons. We did both at the same time. |
Anonymous
|
What does "like pre-team" mean? Like, swimming laps most of the time?
Are the county's "youth advanced" lessons like that too? Or how much time do they spend swimming laps vs getting instruction? |
Anonymous
| If your kid is at the youth advanced level I would recommend a program like Fins. My kid did both Fins and the county program before they started swimming club and Fins was by far the better of the 2. |
Anonymous
I would put them above "pre-team". Some of them may be at or near pre-team level when they start but from what I have observed, most of them are "meet ready"; maybe not completely legal in all strokes and most may not make "A" meets(some might), most of them in Stroke and Turn and beyond pre-team. |
Anonymous
Not at all. |
Anonymous
Hmm, thanks. Can you say more about the differences between what they do in FINS vs the county advanced lessons? (FINS looks more logistically challenging for us but we might be able to swing it... but the beginner "Seahorses" level seems a little below her skills so I don't know if it would be challenging enough, but she's definitely not ready for the next level/intermediate because she doesn't know all 4 strokes.) |
Anonymous
DP but I have a seahorse at Fins. They have the seahorse group in two lanes separated by ability. One group spends more time on kickboards, the other does a lot of lap swimming. IMO they're not great about teaching the strokes. They just have the kids kind of wing it across the pool for the strokes they don't know. (Butterfly, breaststroke.) They also spend what feels like a disproportionate amount of time on freestyle but they don't really make corrections. It's ok but there must be a better program? |
Anonymous
Well, you must have your own criteria that nobody else goes by. |
Anonymous
My kid got frustrated with the county lessons because the ability level was very uneven. Parents would put their kids in a particular group despite their kids not being ready which impacts how the lesson is taught. It was a bad experience with a kid who clearly didn’t belong there and the whole lesson was wasted trying to cater to that kid. Fins was much better at dividing the kids appropriately by ability. When she joined she had a rudimentary understanding of all 4 strokes (maybe not quite legal in fly) so was above the seahorse level, and her ability to do all 4 strokes greatly improved. That said, if I had to do it over, I would bypass the county completely, do Fins to get the basics down, and then go to one of the club stroke schools for refinement. |
Anonymous
+1. This was our experience with Stroke and Turn, but this is at the Rockville location. The required 25 yard swim is a joke. They accept everyone. 2 kids were accepted to the program and can’t even swim 5 yards but they took up an entire lane. The rest of the 8 and under kids were in the second lane. I would not recommend this program. |
Anonymous
| My DCs did S&T and SwiMontgomery at MLK before the pandemic. SwiMontgomery was definitely higher-level in terms of expectations, and it worked well to have in-between-ish swimmers in both programs at once ( = 3x total per week, 1 S&T and 2 SwiMontgomery) to build up stamina. I didn't see either of these as stroke-refinement experiences; rather, they were a chance to introduce DCs to swim _practice_, as opposed to swim lessons. Yes, there were some struggling tadpoles in the wallside lane with instructors walking alongside them, but every kid is that kid at some point when they're learning to swim. DC2 was one of those tadpoles for a little while and really benefited from the high expectations and close individual attention under those circumstances. The non-tadpole lanes can be crowded sometimes, but we were fine with it, especially for the reasonable costs and the quantity of clock time spent actually swimming. |
Anonymous
| FINS seems okay. DD (teen) did it to get ready for summer swim season because she doesn't do club swim year-round and didn't want to look like a flopping fish. Instruction quality varies, but like anything else, your child will get out of it what s/he puts into it. |
Anonymous
| My 5 year old has been in private swim lessons and can do 25 free (breathing needs lots of work but its mostly to the side) and 25 back, and breastroke arms but not legs. And she still tires pretty quickly. She cannot do fly and is no where close as far as I can tell. We're looking to make a change from private lessons because the cost is so high but not sure what would be the right next step for her. Looking for suggestions please! |
Anonymous
| 5 is young to be doing a lot more. I’d get her in a summer swim team to build her endurance. |