Reply to Swim Farm or Norman Swim?

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[quote=Anonymous]My kids have been doing Norman for the last 3 years, and last year we also added in Swim Farm as a supplement after hearing so many good things that fit what we were looking for in a program. Both programs are good, but are completely different in what they offer and what they focus on.

As others have noted here in this thread, from our experience Norman swim is more endurance focused. There are a lot of kids in the pool at one time - but for my kids, this has been a draw for years. There are many kids they go to school with, swim over the summer with, and play other sports with - so it was nice having them in the pool together. The coaches, who are mostly teenagers, were very enthusiastic and fun at practice. That said, there was very little focus on stroke work and almost no individual attention to swimmers. It was great keeping the kids in the water all year, but we needed more. Also, the learn to swim classes offered at Norman are typically packed with extremely young coaches. The kids had fun - but very little growth. Coach Matt is easy to communicate with and is a very nice man with a lot of energy and passion.

We decided to add Swim Farm at the beginning of December last year and Coach Phil offered both of my kids a free trial to see if we liked it. My kids each swam in a group with 3-4 other kids who were at their exact same level and they each had one, sometimes even 2 coaches each. The focus was exclusively on stroke work, turns, and starts. There was a huge emphasis on sprinting with control, all completely based on the group that they were in. The coaches at Swim Farm were required to leave notes on every swimmer they worked with that noted what they worked on that day, what they are doing well, and what they need to continue working on in future sessions. These notes were all accessible to me and was a great way for me to review what they needed to work on with them before they would attend their other practices. The few times I spoke to Coach Phil, it was clear that he was directly involved with and invested in the growth of my swimmers. I reached out to him on a few occasions about wanting my son to be better in butterfly and to improve his starts. I wanted my daughter to learn how to dive instead of bellyflop and learn how to actually sprint breaststroke. At the next practice, he  either had a coach working with my kids 1:1 and would for at least 15-20 minutes and would check on their progress throughout, or would work with my kids himself on the issue. My kids loved the individual attention they got and on multiple occasions told me that it was “the best coaching they have ever had” because they walked away understanding the flaws that they needed to work on. By the time we got to March, both of my kids were attending weekly 2 hour sessions and were making drastic improvements. For Learn to swim instruction, swimmers were working with coaches 1:1 in the instructional pool. From what I observed, there were babies all the way up to 12 year olds learning how to swim. The Swim Farm also offers one on one lessons that are 30 minutes to help with a specific issue that a swimmer may be having. My son did this twice to learn how to do a flip turn. Within two lessons, he had pretty good flip turns which was huge for him as he entered his 9 year old year. My kids also participated in the final “Military Bowl” that they offered right before Memorial Day and absolutely loved winning some unique ribbons with all the different branches of the military on them.

My kids are summer league A meet swimmers for a Division 1 team and typically miss the A meet one or two times each season. This year, they both had amazing summer seasons and my daughter almost qualified for all stars. My kids play many other sports and do other activities so we don’t have time to commit to club swimming.

They will both be doing Swim Farm 2x per week and will also be participating in our summer teams winter program. While we are dropping Norman, it is not because we think that it is a bad program. We actually loved it. But my kids felt like the value in practices with Swim Farm were far greater. Depending on what you/your kids are looking for - either program could be a great fit. [/quote]

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