Lifestyle

Making a Big Splash

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You may not have heard of the City of Peterborough Swimming Club. But you will. We investigate one of the city’s most extraordinary and little-known success stories

“Harriet went into the Paralympics as a fairly unknown person in Great Britain, but I remember meeting her at the back of the stadium after her medal win and she got absolutely mobbed. Her twitter feed immediately went from 200 people to 1,000…” says swimming coach Ben Negus.

“Harriet” is Harriet Lee, one of Ben’s star pupils at City of  Peterborough Swimming Club Making-a-Big-Splash-3(COPS), whose bronze win in the 100m breaststroke at London 2012 must surely have been his highlight of the year. There are literally hundreds of stories of overcoming odds at the Olympics and Paralympics, but Harriet’s is perhaps more impressive than most. Just four months before competing she was in intensive care, unable to walk, let alone swim. But  somehow, she fought back. Then she became ill again, after the first day of the Games. Still she didn’t give up. It’s a testament not only to her fighting spirit, but also to the club that has nurtured it. And if that sounds a tenuous connection, bear in mind that this club also boasts King’s School student Zara Bailey, who swims for Jamaica, Team GB Triathlete Charlotte McCrae, Olympic hopeful Chloe Hannam and our next great prospect for gold at Rio, 19-year-old swimming phenomenon Liam Knight.

This year, the club finished eighth in the national club rankings – all the more remarkable given that COPS has only 123 members, and only a 25 metre pool in which to train. Clearly this under-resourced club has some serious passion and ambition that is driving it to excel – and my best guess is that Head Coach Ben has a lot to do with that.

I caught up with Ben at the British Gas ASA National Championships in Sheffield, where COPS had already figured in seven finals, qualifying for three that afternoon. Despite the pressures of the competition with announcements going on all around and the need to prepare session plans for Zara, competing at the World Championships in Barcelona, he was happy to give up part of his precious lunch break to talk about the club. One senses that here is a driven man, used to long hours.

“I’m here there and everywhere! There’s no rest for the wicked…” he says. His regular weekly schedule is no less hectic.

“On a Monday morning I wake up at 4.30am to get to the pool for 5.30. We start at 5.30 Monday to Friday. My Mondays and Thursdays finish at 9.30 at night – so, early start, late finish! Saturday and Sunday we don’t do early mornings…”

Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays are also admin days for full-time coach Ben, and an average week will consist of anything from 50 to 70 hours.

“It’s an all-in kind of job to do, but I have a great team supporting me,” he says.

That work ethic is instilled into the club’s swimmers, too. Youngsters start doing about five hours a week in the pool, while someone at the top level, like Liam, will do about 26 hours – with an additional 4-5 hours of gym and land training on top of that.

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Ask Liam if Ben is a tough coach, and there’s no hesitation:

“Yes! He will shout at you very loudly if you do something wrong or if you don’t hit your times. He’s a great motivator, but he can be tough when he wants to be – which is nearly all the time…”

Fortunately, Liam is smiling as he says this. He adds: “we definitely wouldn’t be where we are now without him.

Part of the reason Ben commands such respect is that he has practised what he preaches.

“I was a swimmer myself, once upon a time, on a pretty successful swim programme called NOVA Centurion. They produced Becky Adlington. When I went to university I helped with coaching there and became a head coach.”

He’s actually been a head coach, in various sports, for 13 years now – initially in Derbyshire, then for the last six years at the Peterborough club. So, what was it that drew him to COPS in the first place?

“I needed to move up a level. At the time, Peterborough was producing national swimmers, but just a small number, with good pool time, and I saw an opportunity. They were a good club with potential but hadn’t really achieved much in recent history.”

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The key challenge the club faced – and still faces – relates to what Ben calls their “double-edged sword”.

“It’s quite a small club. A lot of the teams we compete against have 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 members, and we’ve got just 123 members. So, we have a lot of pool time, but not very much pool space. But what that allows us to do is give the small number of swimmers we have a lot of quality coaching, and that’s really what attracted me. It just needed someone to drive it forward. We’ve got some great coaches but they just didn’t have the support.”

That support was something Ben aimed to bring to the mix, with a more structured approach to training.

“At the time they needed drive and direction. When I joined, it was quite easy for the swimmers to take the easy option and do what they liked – as little as they liked, as much as they liked – but now there’s a structured programme in which they have to do a set number of session at a certain age and a set development level. And I consistently stick to that. And that’s where we’re reaping the rewards, through that consistency.”

In fact, Liam’s weekly training routine is so structured that when asked he’s able to recite it, hour by hour, off the top of his head. This more professional approach is clearly paying dividends.

“When I started, we had me as a full-time head coach, and two part-time assistants who helped out. Now we have two full-time coaches, and a team of seven part-time assistants, so the professionalism across the board has improved massively.”

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