Practice Guidelines
- Please try to be on time for practice. This makes it much easier for me to determine which lanes should be designated for which practice levels.
- If you normally swim in a lane with other people please wait until the majority of them are present to start your practice, OR, be prepared to re-swim the warm up. Warm up is an incredibly important part of practice and helps ensure that swimmers do not injure themselves. Everybody should warm up prior to swimming with intensity.
- Pick an appropriate level to swim at, at the beginning of practice. Practices should be challenging throughout their duration but not impossible. To help accommodate this each lane is allowed to modify intervals to make the practice appropriately challenging for them.
- Once you are in a lane please stay there unless asked to move by the coach. If you feel that you are not going to be challenged enough on a particular set, notify the coach who will move you into a more appropriate lane with as little disruption to that lane as possible. It is important that you do not move yourself into another lane as most lanes are at different places in practice at any given time. Simply moving into another lane can be very disruptive to swimmers in the affected lane.
- If you have 3 or fewer people in your lane leave 10 seconds apart to avoid bunching up. If you have 4 or more people in your lane leave 5 seconds apart.
- If you need to pass someone, it is appropriate to touch that person’s foot once per length to notify them you want to pass. That person should then move to the outside of the lane to allow you to pass on the inside. Prior to the start of a set your lane should come up with an appropriate order to minimize the amount of passing that takes place.
- If you are consistently touching somebody’s foot it is appropriate to ask them if you can move ahead of them during the rest between repetitions. If someone has asked to move ahead of you it is appropriate to let them so that both of you will have an appropriately challenging, undisrupted set.
- Circle swimming is MANDATORY for the first 30 minutes of practice. This will allow individuals who arrive late to easily enter your lane. After the first 30 minutes of practice you may split a lane if there are 2 or fewer people in a lane.
