Swimmers are excited to make a splash

Denton Artistic Swimming Club is appealing for new members to take the plunge and enrol on their 12 week Academy Course once the pool reopens at the Tameside Wellness Centre.

The club was traditionally based at Denton Swimming Pool but moved out of the facility and into the state-of-the-art Wellness Centre last March.

But the move coincided with the outbreak of Covid-19 and left members without a place to train for a considerable period.

Having been left frustrated at the stop-start nature of the pandemic, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel with news that the pool will finally reopen, in line with government guidance, on April 12.

Head coach Elizabeth Fitzgerald, who adopted the roll last March, is excited about the reopening and hopes there will be a big uptake in the  Academy Course - especially from males.

Speaking to Reporter Sport, Elizabeth, who has 30 years’ experience in the pool, said: “It’s an introduction to artistic swimming, so what we teach is the sculling, going upside down, the different variations of the strokes, pattern formations, how to synchronise with the music, and we put everything that we learn throughout the course together for a one minute routine in front of the rest of the club and parents. Swimmers have to be age six or over and are comfortable swimming front and back in the water.

“A couple of years ago they allowed men to start competing in artistic swimming, so we’re really eager for boys to come and have a go as well. It’s a great sport because not only is it dramatic, but it’s also very strong as we do a lot of boosts and throwing of people.”

Like most clubs up and down the country, there is now a fear that, due to a considerable lack of activity over a sustained period, there will be a dropoff in particiption rates.

However, Elizabeth is optimistic about the situation and says her members are relishing the chance to return to the pool. “We finished with our Christmas Show at the end of the last academy on 19 December, and we were all ready to come back but thats been put on hold. Our over 18s' section haven’t been in the water since September.

“We’ve had one person from the main club leave, which is pretty good going, and a couple of people who finished the academy decided not to carry on but they may come back. We’re a small club and we were building anyway, but we can’t wait to get back and use the great facilities. We’ll be using the rooftop to do our fitness training, stretching and land-based activities.

“Flexibility is incredibly important in synchronised swimming, because when we do the splits we do them upside down in the water and don’t have gravity pushing us down, so we have to have something called oversplits. We do a lot of yoga, as well as strength and conditioning work with a paid instructor - that’s for the club, not the academy - and then we do dance and drama, as well as a little bit of gymnastics. We then get in the pool and do a little bit of fitness training, along with the technical and artistic side of things, and we’ll finish with the routines”.

Despite being a popular Olympic sport, funding is hard to come by and most athletes are self-funded.

While the financial impact of Covid-19 is hard to ignore, the social aspect of the sport, which has been missing for the best part of 12 months, has also been detrimental. Elizabeth added: “We work in very close-knit teams of eight to ten people, so they spend a lot of time together practising and they have to work as a team for it to come off well.

“We do a lot of team-based activities and team building activities, so all of us are just desperate to get back into chlorinated waters.”

Due to the ramifications of Covid-19, the sport  has been forced to adapt to new rules in order to comply with health regulations. “We think the rules will be the same as they were after the first and second lockdowns, so we have cones at the side of the pool which socially distance our swimmers” said Elizabeth.

“Our routines are usually very tight together, but we’ll have to do them socially distanced and the one part we aren’t allowed to do at the moment is the acrobatic lift, where a group under the water push a swimmer up who then does a jump or a summersault. We haven’t been allowed to do those for a year now”.

In a bid to source extra funding and guidance, the club has affiliated into the Tameside Sport and Physical Activity Network, headed up by Andy Dwyer and working in conjunction with Active Tameside.

Elizabeth heaped praise on the network and believes the relationship bodes well for the future. “Andy has been incredibly helpful and he’s always enthusiastic. Because we’re a different sport that not many people know about, he’s great at pushing our agenda and letting people know that we’re here.

“Moving forward, he will be helping us to find assistant coaches and funding to qualify them.”

To keep up to date with the latest developments at the club, you can follow them on Twitter @DentonSynchro

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