A swimming introduction

Hello Swimming World,
My name is Blair Piddington and I have been a swim coach at Machine Aquatics since 2001.  More and more this year I have been writing emails to the parents on my team and have been trying to push off my thoughts about how I am going to make their swimmer great and my views of swimming at different parts of the season.  I just learned about how to write and create blogs and decided this would be a great platform to start writing down different ideas and overall thoughts on the world of swimming.  I plan on writing my blog and having new posts whenever I have an idea or have encountered a situation that I think could help other people or interest others.  I am part of the swim coaches idea exchange on Facebook and have noticed that a lot of the coaches have similar issues, and many of them I've dealt with during my time with Machine Aquatics.  This first blog is going to be just a little bit about myself, my history with swimming, and my overall thoughts on where these blogs may go.


As I said I have been coaching with Machine Aquatics since 2001 and couldn't be happier.  I have been lucky enough to become part of the Machine family since before it was even Machine because I swam for Dan Jacobs from the time I was a little guy at 7 back in 1989.  Dan has been a mentor of mine and role model through the years I swam and have now coached and a whole lot of the creativity I have learned has come from Dan.  One thing he has taught me is to continue to strive to be better than you already are and that there is always new information and innovative ways out there, continue to educate yourself and try and be the best.  I've worked with many coaches and have hopefully taken a little bit from each and every one of them (it's ok to steal ideas from other coaches, that's how we get better).  I swam for York growing up and swam for Greg through High School, then was lucky enough to swim for Peter Ward at George Mason University for my 4 years through college.  I've coached a little bit of all ages and currently am a head site coach at Oak Marr for the 12 and under swimmers.  In addition each swimmer and parent (I know we don't like to admit it) has helped me become the coach I am today and hopefully only half the coach I will be in 10 years.

To not go too in depth with a bio, I hope that some of the topics I write about will be things that you all can make connections to and maybe you can use some of my ideas or ways I handle things.  Blogs are supposed to be ways to get your views out there, and if you don't agree with some of the things I say or my views I'm totally ok with that.  Its great that there are many different coaches with many different views on how to handle things, which means there is something out there for everyone.  This blog will be designed for a little bit of everyone; coaches, swimmers, parents, swim fans, and especially my Mom Dad and Brother who I'm sure will be the majority of my views.

My ideas for future blogs are: about practice attendance, a nutrition blog, a blog about taking ownership of your groups, a blog about yardage during workouts, a blog about how kids are up for the challenge, and a blog about making your practice a community and an actual team.  Those are my initial ideas about things I'll talk about, with more after that.

-Blair