Things to teach your development squad swimmers (9&10 years old)

Most swimmers in this group began in the novice programme, so they have a background in technique. They are still high energy and low focus, but they have more control over their aquatic selves compared with the younger swimmers. At this age, girls tend to learn technique quicker and focus better than the boys.

So the key things to do for these swimmers are:

• Keep them happy. Be sure they are getting better and more skilled, and make sure they know it. As with younger swimmers, you want them excited about coming to practice and nagging their parents to let them come more.

• Teach them culture. "How do we do things here" is an important statement because it includes the love of competition, the goal of continuous improvement, the setting of high expectations, the value of hard and consistent work, the love of challenges, the focus on performance, the continual goal setting, and the importance of doing things well. These attitudes underlie all the physical training.
• Emphasize skill development as the primary focus of training. These years are a sensitive time for many of the abilities underlying good stroke technique, including agility, balance, coordination, flexibility, and rhythm. The training programme should emphasize working on and mastering all four strokes with many stroke drills and much variety to maximize the size of the swimmer's mottor patern arsenal. Swimmers should learn and practice a variety of rhythms and timing, such as straight arms and high elbows recoveries on freestyle, catch up and oppositional timing on freestyle, and various breathing patterns.
• Emphasize aerobic development as the secondary focus on training. Since most technical work and improvement should occur while swimming short aerobic sets with relatively short rests between repeats, technical gains are mirrored by gains in aerobic endurance. Young kids have short attention spans and will not pay attention to long speeches, so keep them moving, keep their heart rates up, and vary the stroke emphases to keep their minds attentive. Using backstroke is a great and effective way to improve their aerobic capacity.
• With dryland work, emphasize coordination, flexibility, core strength, and quickness. You want to develop better athletes, and dryland training can supplement swimming. This training need not be complicated, nor does it require expensice equipment. Body weight exercises, simple core strengthening work, basic stretches, and games will do just fine. When the weather permits, playing games outside and keeping score also helps develop competitive kids. 
• Target certain event. For both physiological and psychological reasons, you can target certain events for your swimmer's training, namely the 100s of the four competitive strokes, the 200m and 400m freestyle and the 200m IM. Pay little attention to the 50s as you're aiming to develop well rounded swimmers who are good at every stroke and who have the technical skills and aerobic conditioning to excel at the longer events.
• Continue teaching them to be swimmers. Coaches should aim at making the 9 and 10s swimming veterans, experts at using the pace clock on involved and complicated sets, starting on time consistenly, getting their times correctly, setting goals for sets and repeats, and taking care of their equipment.

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