I recently decided to retrain as a swim instructor. This was a fairly straightforward decision for me. Prior to having kids I taught high school for a decade, and I also have Cert III and IV in Fitness. Swim teaching involves two of my loves, teaching kids and fitness. I also did swimming lessons and squad from 4-16, so I’m pretty comfortable in the water, and really enjoy watching my own children’s swimming lessons. I’m not suddenly going to convert this into a swimming blog but I did have something from my training that I wanted to share with you.
In order to become a swim instructor I enrolled in Austswim’s Teacher of Swimming and Water Safety course. This is their base level course to learn the ropes. It involves a two day course, online reading with ten tests, plus twenty hours Industry Training followed by an assessment of your teaching competency. They don’t just do a two day course and throw you into teaching, there’s plenty of support to get you not just competent but confident.
I have enjoyed my entire experience thus far and am only awaiting the final assessment, but one thing really stood out for me. On the first day of the two day course my lecturer, Mehdi Aardin, said that swimming is the only sport that if you don’t train in it you’ll die. Now those weren’t his exact words but they were quite staggering. I immediately thought, I know people who can’t swim and they’re still alive, but then he unpacked the statement further. If you head to a park on your own and kick a football around without ever having trained, you’re probably not going to die. If you decide to go for a jog on your own one day, you’re probably not going to die. If you try to do a long jump on your own without training you won’t get very far, but you probably won’t die. However, should you decide to randomly jump into the deep end of a pool one day, on your own, without any training, you very well could drown. It’s a sobering reality. It’s a skill that saves lives was often repeated by Aardin.
I can’t argue with this, nor do I want to. Learning to swim saves lives. If your child one day wants to go fishing in a boat and falls in, they’ll need to swim. When they enter school they’ll need to swim, aquatics is part of the NSW PDHPE K-10 curriculum. If they want to go to the beach with their friends, they’ll need to swim. If they want to go sailing, they’ll need to swim. If they are going to work near a body of water, then it will be infinitely safer if they know how to swim. If they get stuck in the water for any reason, learning to swim will make them safer. Learning to swim and to be safe in the water isn’t just for if you think your kid will be the next Ian Thorpe, it’s a survival skill.
As I said, I’m not suddenly converting this into a swimming blog, but this message really stuck with me so I wanted to share it with you.
Mehdi Aardin is the coordinator at Badgers Swim School in Milson Point, which caters for babies to champions and is the CEO of Home Swim.
Find council listed Learn to Swim classes for North Sydney here.
Find council listed Learn to Swim classes in City of Sydney with centers at The Domain, Surry Hills, Camperdown, Sydney City, and Ultimo.
Find council listed Learn to Swim classes in the Sydney’s Inner West here.
To find a great swim school in your area Austswim can be a great starting point, find them here.
Read SBS’s most recent article on swimming, research on drowning, and learning to swim here.
See important statistics in regards to drownings in Australia provided by Royal Life Saving Australia here.
I’ll leave you with this SNL clip of the greatest swimming instructor of all time… you better believe I’m searching the storeroom tomorrow for that device.
Grab my book, Postnatal Depression Sucks, here.
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