Practice Groups
Five practice groups take a swimmer from a first swim meet to the YMCA New England Championships.
Spinners
First team group after lessons: all four strokes, starts and turns, and a first swim meet.
Strypers
Solid swimmers with legal strokes, starts and turns. First taste of conditioning.
Duskys
Refinement for experienced racers, with age-appropriate dryland training.
Silver
For swimmers who have made swimming their primary sport. Aiming for YMCA New Englands.
Gold
Our most committed swimmers, chasing peak performance at championship meets.
Group selection process
Age
Chronological age is important for group placement, however, emotional and physical maturity can vary greatly among children of the same chronological age. Even, if a swimmer is fast, he or she may not be prepared for the workload of a particular training group. Social considerations are prioritized to ensure children have a positive social experience while training.
Background
Athletic history is strongly considered when assigning new swimmers to a particular training group.
Swimming Skills
Participants must possess the swimming skills necessary to swim with a given group. If a child has not yet mastered the skills necessary to move up to the next group it is more difficult to progress through the next set of skills. Consequently, that group’s coach will be unfairly focused on that swimmer, neglecting the others who have mastered those skills.
Coach's Decision
The coaching staff possess decades of experience working with children in schools, as parents and as coaches. All of them were competitive swimmers. This experience guides the coach’s intuition in placing a candidate in the right practice group and, ultimately, supports the coach as an instructor and role model.
Placement and moving up
- Coaches evaluate each candidate for program and training group placement.
- Initial placement is primarily age-based, but a swimmer's background and skill level matter too, and in some cases may supersede the recommended age for a group.
- Parents and swimmers should set short- and long-term goals and, with the coach's guidance, decide whether a group fits those goals.
- Coaches follow each athlete's progress through the season and may move them to a group better suited to their skills and fitness.
- Athletes and parents may discuss group changes with the head coach. Parents cannot move their child to another group without the head coach's consent.
Found the right group?
Registration steps, the KYD Handbook and season tuition are on one page.