Making Waves Swim School is truly dedicated to ensuring swimmers are safe in and around water. Using a ‘crawl before you walk’ approach, our instructors focus on teaching skills that span beyond just learning how to swim in order to appreciate and respect their surroundings.
For comparison purposes, before building a big, beautiful house one would want to ensure the foundation the house is being built upon is a solid one. If the ground is soft or the foundation is weak, the house will not endure the elements and won’t be around for the long term. At that point, work done on, in or around the house will effectively be pointless. (We love analogies.)
So, how do we ensure our students are safe while they’re swimming?
Surviving and Thriving
One must be accustomed to their surroundings, to master the skills being utilized within those surroundings. Knowing how to properly enter and exit the water, the ability to switch from swimming to a resting position and a familiarity with multiple lifesaving skills is what sets our swimmers apart in their ability to swim properly and safely.
Perfection Shmerfection
While beautiful swim strokes and form are visually appealing, feeling safe and confident in the water is more important. In an emergency situation, would it matter how graceful you looked? Of course, everyone can appreciate a good looking stroke but looking like a professional swimmer doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you can save yourself or someone else. We do not over emphasize the need for ‘perfect’ swimming and instead urge our students to focus on feeling comfortable in the water before attempting to perfect their every movement.
Muscle Memory
When a swimmer is used to basic skills like treading water, floating on their backs and flutter kicks, their muscles become accustomed to the movements. The more our swimmers practice these basic skills, the more conditioned their bodies become. A stronger body allows a swimmer to focus on learning new skills, when they’re relying on their limbs to support them in the water.
Of course, we strive to help swimmers with their ultimate goals of learning how to swim and continually enhancing their swim skills. Want to be able to jump and dive into a pool, tread water and jump waves at the beach, or be a part of your swim team at school? You’ll learn all the skills necessary to do each of those things. But, we focus on the safety and well-being of each of our swimmers first and foremost. A confident swimmer is a safe swimmer. And the more safe swimmers we instruct, the more successful we consider our great program.