Target reached!
Thank you so much for all the support so far. If we do go onto get £22500 we are goi...
City of Derby Swimming Club - COVID Appeal
Littleover, England, United Kingdom
Aim
Our aim is to get all of our swimmers (+those yet to join) back in the pool, training and readying themselves for the competitions to come!
About Us
We are City of Derby Swimming Club and we have been offering high quality professional coaching (for all ages and abilities) for nearly 40 years. Like so many other clubs, COVID-19 has hit us hard and now we are in need of your support.
Our swimmers are incredibly dedicated and as such have continued to train throughout lockdowns from the comfortable, although much dryer, setting of their own houses. Being out of the pool is very tough for us all to cope with mentally, physically and financially.
COVID Problems
Mentally the pool is a home away from home for us and gives each of our swimmers a support system on which they can rely, however due to the pandemic much of this system has been vastly reduced. It is a hard time for everyone so in a way we are lucky that some of support systems have stayed intact and for this we can only thank our brilliant coaches for keeping us together with morale up!
Physically it is an incredibly hard task to recreate the full body workout experience of being in the pool. This is one of the things that the money raised on this page will go towards, retaining and in some cases attaining pool time for all of our squads from Junior Development (our youngest swimmers) all the way up to Masters (our adult swimmers).
Finally financially, we made the decision to only partially furlough some of our coaches meaning that they could still provide some coaching to our squads but this also meant that we were paying out while not bringing much in. One way that we were bringing in less money was because we reduced our fees during lockdowns 1 and 3. Another lack of money came because we usually host multiple swimming competitions through the year, unfortunately these all had to be cancelled due to either pool closure or the inability to gather that many people together. Thus one of our main routes of income became unavailable to us.
With the oncoming re-entry into the pools closing (and hopefully no more shut downs on their way) we need now more than ever to be in a stable place financially so that we can allow our swimmers quality pool time and quality coaching. Please help us to do this.
What We Do
We strive to improve our athletes not only as swimmers but as people, to do this we hold team events especially for our youngest members so they can form tight bonds in their squads. By doing this friendships are built and maintained.
Another way we help our swimmers develop is yearly swim camps for all ages, these are both in the UK and abroad. The younger squads' camps range from 2 days to 5 days in the UK and are focused on skills (social, team and swimming), this is while the older squads spend about a week abroad getting pushed to their limits training hard and having fun. These camps are the sort of thing that we are hoping to get back to when normality resumes but we can only do this if we survive the current troubling period.
When not on squad socials or camps away we are training hard striving towards our swimming goals. Everyone has their "Olympics" whether it be getting to county championships or British championships or even being recognised by the Swim England Talent Pathway. Whatever the target a swimmer sets we as a club aim to help them achieve it.
It is not just our swimmers that we aim to help and as such we have a history of donating to charities. We have done this in a variety of ways for example: biting into whole lemons to raise money for Teenage Cancer Trust and Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham; swimming events for Functional Neurological Disorders Dimensions; selling NHS caps to give to local NHS charities; collecting and filling shoeboxes for Samaritans and more.
The Crowdfunder
During the time that the page is open we will be doing quite a few things to give back to you, the donators! This will be made up of challenges which we'll keep you updated with, a raffle and a few items to sell. Pictured below are some of the raffle prizes as well as an idea what the ducks will look like.
The first challenge that we will be doing is a two week "triathlon" (first four days distance challenge running, the next four days distance work on the bike and finally a week of hard swimming again for distance). This is going to be a massive test for all of our squads especially as the swim week of the "triathlon" we are planning for the first week back in the pool!
Sport England: Active Together has provided £6,000 of match funding
This project successfully funded on 13th May 2021