Swim England launches new Coaching Open Water Swimming qualification

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It’s Coaching Week 2019 – the perfect time to unveil Swim England’s fantastic new Level 2 Coaching Open Water Swimming qualification.

Replacing the Level 2 Award in British Open Water Swimming, this qualification has been designed to provide learners with the specialist knowledge needed to deliver OW swimming sessions. It has been developed to meet the needs of today’s coaches and swimmers, as the sport’s popularity continues to grow.

Course participants will learn about:

  • The roles and responsibilities of coaching OW swimming
  • The advantages and disadvantages of different types of equipment
  • The different opportunities available to OW swimmers
  • How to plan for coaching sessions
  • How to develop session management skills

By the end of the qualification learners will have the skills needed to work as a coach and effectively and independently plan, prepare, deliver, monitor and evaluate a series of open water training sessions.

Open water coaching tips

Sharon Lock, Swim England’s National Masters and Open Water Development Officer, said: “The Level 2 Coaching Open Water Swimming qualification provides everything required to coach in any kind of circumstance – whether you are working with elite swimmers, beginners or anything in between.

“We know within the open water environment that changing from the pool to the lake or sea requires significant health and safety planning. That’s all still included but we’ve also added more of the hints, tips and techniques that today’s coaches were asking for.

“We’re focusing on more in-depth session plans around different types of athletes because as an open water coach you can be working with everything from social swimmers right through to our elite open water talent swimmers.

“The whole emphasis has been about making it a better experience for the coaches so they can learn how to transfer the skills they have from the pool into an open water environment.”

Meeting rising demand

Research from the Sport England Active Lives survey has revealed that more than 4.1 million people swam in lakes, lochs, rivers and seas between November 2017 and 2018.

Sharon believes that the new Swim England qualification will help address that rising demand – and create more high-quality coaches.

She added: “The amount of events across the country this summer is just incredible. There is huge interest and it follows on that there must be a demand for first class open water coaches too.

“Open water swimming is popular with children of all different ages now and we want to encourage groups and venues to work with any age. It’s about their ability not their age, so there is a lot more content included around coaching children too.”

  • Find out more about the new Swim England Level 2 Coaching OW Swimming qualification at bit.ly/OWinformation
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