Coach Training The Swim Team

Getting Your Swim Program Up and Running With Coach Training The Swim Team

I bought into Coach Training The Swim Team last season because I was spending way too many hours each week manually creating practice sets and tracking athlete progression. The platform promises to automate set generation, handle stroke technique analysis, and keep meet results organized. Most of it works. Some of it doesn't. The installation itself is straightforward. You create an account through their website, pay the subscription fee which runs about $49 per month per coach at the time of this writing, and then they send you a download link for the desktop application. There's also a web dashboard that syncs with the local app, so you can pull up swimmer stats from your phone while standing by the pool. I run it on a Windows machine. There is a Mac version, but several people in our coaching community report that the Mac build occasionally lags when loading video analysis files.

Why Coach Training The Swim Team Matters For Modern Programs

Before this tool, I was building every practice set by hand in a spreadsheet, then handwriting adjustments on the board before each session. That took roughly two hours every Sunday evening. After getting Coach Training The Swim Team set up, I built out my template library and now my weekly programming takes about twenty minutes. The time savings are real. The system works by letting you build reusable practice blocks — warm-up sets, drill sequences, main sets, and cool-downs — and then assembling them into full practices based on athlete level and training phase. You tag each block with intensity metrics, stroke focus, and yardage targets. The software then calculates whether your practice hits your stated goals before you finalize it. This catches mistakes that would have cost me a 1500-yard main set that was actually only 1200 yards because I mis-added the distances in my head. One feature I did not expect to use much turned out to be the most valuable part: the stroke analysis module. You film a swimmer from the side and below the water, upload the clips, and the software breaks down stroke rate, distance per stroke, and turn efficiency. It's not perfectly accurate. I found that the automated distance-per-stroke readings tend to overestimate by about eight to twelve percent for younger swimmers with less refined technique. You have to cross-reference with your own eyes before relying on those numbers. But even with that margin of error, the trend data over time is useful. If a swimmer's DPS drops from 1.4 meters to 1.2 meters over three weeks of training, you know something needs to change in their practice structure.

Another thing that caught me off guard was the meet result integration. The platform pulls from timing company data feeds if your club uses one of the supported systems — Meet Mobile, Timing Pro, or Universal Timing. If you use a different timing setup, you have to manually import results through a CSV file, which adds another fifteen to twenty minutes after every meet. I switched to Timing Pro partly because of this, and it cut my post-meet administrative work down to nearly nothing. There are some significant limitations you should know about before committing. The mobile app is basically a viewer. You cannot edit practice sets on your phone or adjust training plans while you are poolside. I had a situation where one of my distance groups needed a last-minute set adjustment because the weather forecast suddenly changed and we had to move from outdoor to indoor competition. I ended up having to go back to my laptop to make the changes while the kids were already in the water. It worked, but it was stressful and I missed a few seconds of pool time figuring out the interface under pressure. The developers say a full mobile editor is coming in the next major release, but that has been on the roadmap for eight months now. The other real problem is the reporting export functionality. If you need to send parent summaries or program assessment reports to your athletic director, the built-in report templates are rigid. You can customize colors and fonts, but you cannot restructure the layout or add custom columns. I ended up exporting the raw data to Excel and building my own report format, which defeats part of the time-saving purpose. For my program, I just send parents a screenshot of the swimmer's progress chart rather than a formal document.

Getting Started Without Wasting Money

If you are thinking about adopting Coach Training The Swim Team, do not pay for a full year upfront. Start with the monthly plan and run it for sixty days. Test it during a normal training block, not during championship prep when everything is more stressful than usual. You will learn faster whether the workflow fits your coaching style. Also spend the first week just watching the tutorial videos that come with the subscription. I skipped those initially and spent three hours trying to figure out how to duplicate a practice block across multiple athlete groups. There is a keyboard shortcut for that — Ctrl plus D on the desktop version — but it is only mentioned in the third tutorial video. I learned that the hard way. The biggest mistake I see new users make is building too many practice sets before the system is calibrated to their specific population. I created about forty blocks in the first two weeks without entering any real swimmer data. When I finally tried to generate a full practice, the software recommended sets that were wildly inappropriate for my beginner group because the algorithms had nothing to work with. Populate your athlete profiles first — age, stroke specialties, personal bests, training history — and then start filling the block library. It takes longer upfront but saves you from rebuilding sets you realize are wrong after the fact.

Customer support response times vary. I have gotten replies within a few hours for billing questions, but technical issues with the video upload feature have taken up to three business days. The help documentation is comprehensive but written for developers, not swim coaches. If you hit a wall, check the community forum where other users share workarounds. That is where I found the fix for the Mac video lag issue — turning off hardware acceleration in the settings. The download link and current pricing information are available on the official Coach Training The Swim Team website. There is a free fourteen-day trial that gives you access to all features, which I would recommend using to test whether the platform actually reduces your workload or just adds another tool you have to maintain alongside your existing systems. For my program, it has. My Tuesday evening planning time went from two hours to under thirty minutes, and the consistency in practice quality improved enough that my sprinters started seeing faster times in the fifty freestyle events within four weeks. It is not perfect. The Mac performance issues are real, the mobile app is incomplete, and the reporting tools need work. But for a swim coach who wants to stop wasting Sunday nights on practice construction and start focusing on actual instruction, it does what it promises. Just go in knowing where the cracks are.