Swimming South Africa recently revealed the launch of a new high-performance academy in Pretoria, marking another step in the organization’s goal of increasing participation in swimming across the nation.
Located at Garsfontein High School, the academy will be run in collaboration with the Royal Fins Aquatics Swimming Club.
As with the Tyger Valley College Campus academy launched in 2018, the endeavor aligns with Swimming South Africa’s three-tiered strategy of building capacity at Universities, Schools and Clubs for high-performance sport. The idea is that these regional structures can incorporate schools and clubs in a hub, which can then access coaching expertise and sports science support
Olympian and Commonwealth Games champion Pieter Coetze was selected as an ambassador for the academy.
Speaking at the launch, Coetzé said, “I think the initiative is great for young swimmers and to develop the sport a bit from a young age, because that’s when it’s really got a big impression and when you can really start to fall in love with swimming a bit like I did.
“So I think it’s great to get more young swimmers to train and actually swim more than doing other sports, or rather than stopping swimming to do other sports.”
Swimming South Africa’s High-Performance Manager Dean Price also attended the opening ceremony and stated, “Today was a very important day for Swimming South Africa. It was the launch of one of our performance schools in Garsfontein in Pretoria. And this is a huge step, and a very important step, because the direction in which high-performance swimming, and South African swimming as a whole, is going is to establish relationships with schools and tertiary institutions.”
He continued, “This will give us a huge base, a huge pool of swimmers which we can draw on and perform at the highest level, Olympics, world champs. So this is a big initiative, it’s a laudable initiative, it’s the only thing that’s going to work in our country in the future is to have centres that can sustain themselves, with loadshedding and all the other kinds of problems that the general population have to deal with.
“We really want to encourage schools and clubs to form a relationship where we can come in as Swimming South Africa and establish a High-Performance Centre where we can give the swimmers, especially linked to an education system, the opportunity of training and performing at the highest level of sport in the world.”
