The TISA CEESA Swimming Team, along with 60 other Baku Sharks aged 8 to 17, took part in an amazing array of swim clinics hosted by two Olympic swimmers, Joost Reijns and Sebastiaan Verschuren! Joost and Sebastiaan are retired professional swimmers that competed in the Olympics and World Championships.

The weekend began with Joost and Sebastian coming to school and holding an assembly for both the Primary and Secondary students focusing on goals in life, reflecting on successes and setbacks and how to move forward and continue to strive for success. We found it very interesting, and were in awe to learn how much training the Olympians had to do every day!

There were six clinics - starts & turns, breaststroke, backstroke, freestyle, butterfly and an invitational competitive mindset clinic. Before the clinics, participants would do half an hour of dryland training, which means doing lots of exercises that warm-up the muscles. Either Joost or Sebastiaan would get into the pool with the swimmers and show us how to do each drill. Most of the things we did were technical, so we didn’t do a lot of distance swimming… thank goodness! There was also a freestyle swim clinic for the adults, and a ‘Cheese and Wine’ night at Sunset Cafe, where Joost and Sebastiaan spoke to the adults about their experiences with swimming. This meant that the whole swimming community - children and adults, were able to enjoy the experience of being with the Dutch Olympic swimmers!

We spent an overall time of 2 ½ hours of dryland training, 6 ¼ hours in the pool, and 1 hour speaking to the Olympians about competitive mindsets. It really did feel like we lived in the Aquatic Centre for the three days we were there! These clinics gave us the opportunity to improve our strokes and get feedback from professional swimmers. We swam in three different pools - the diving pool, the 25m pool and the 50m pool, which meant that there was a lot of variety for everyone. This also gave all the swimmers a bit of a change, as not many of the Baku Sharks are able to regularly swim in a 50m pool.

As the swim clinics came to an end, we did a demonstration in the Aquatic Centre to show our parents what we had learnt. The secondary and primary school swimmers had their own individual time to show off what they had improved, before we all did some relays and tumbleturns together! Lots of memories and jokes were made between the swimmers and the Olympians, which helped lots of people feel a bit more comfortable speaking to and swimming with Joost and Sebastiaan! Overall, the swim clinics were an incredible experience that we swimmers will never forget. Also a big thank you to Ms.Marieke for organising everything, and to all of the coaches for supervising and helping everyone be in the right place at the right time!