This last week has been NATIONAL VOLUNTEERS WEEK so I want to pay tribute to all the 40 + volunteers we have to help the smooth running of both our Sunday Adult session and our Thursday Junior session.

As you can see we are a happy loyal team coming from many different schools and year groups across the county, as well as our more mature team members. Chris Humphris who has been voluntarily running this swimming session for over 30 years says that he has never had to advertise and it is usually word of mouth between the volunteers that brings in younger volunteers as we lose the older ones to work or university (although many of them come back and volunteer in their holidays). Many of the volunteers have told me that they have made friends with people in different year groups and schools and that is half of the fun. In case you haven’t figured it our Chris is the guy on the left hand side of the picture giving a great big wave along with everyone else.

What do they do?

They are taught how to use the hoist and help transfer people across safely from their wheelchairs.

Here Sarah one of our volunteers helps Dean into the swimming pool, where there will be a couple of helpers to support or just be with him as he swims his lengths. Some swimmers will always need support, others will move on to learning to swim, improving their strokes or counting how many lengths they can do.  People use the water for physio and then other swimmers have the chance to move across to a local swimming club and start on a para-swimming pathway.

We all gather on the far side of the pool for the beginning of the session where one of our long standing volunteers will take the register and match the appropriate volunteers with swimmers.  This can be quite a tricky job as until the evening we are never exactly sure of the number of swimmers or volunteers we will have – however it somehow always manages to work out.

Above Keith and Ruth are helping Basil and then Penny is demonstrating beautifully to Jamie.

I love the picture on the left as it shows so beautifully how important the support and 1:1 or 2;1 ratio of volunteers to swimmers is so important.  The picture on the right was our very first Junior session at Newland’s pool and we have now grown from 2 swimmers to 8 in our first session and 6 in our second session just in the space of a term.

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Above I have presented the two boys who took part in our first term at Newland’s pool with official ASA certificates and badges.  The yellow shirts on Kat and Ka Yan and on any of our other volunteers denotes that they have National Pool Lifeguard Qualifications and now we have two Level 1 Swimming teachers blue shirts have also been introduced for them.

OUR VOLUNTEERS ARE AMAZING AND WE COULDN’T MANAGE WITHOUT THEM SO A HUGE THANK-YOU TO ALL OF THEM FROM CHRIS AND I WHO COULDN’T RUN THE SWIMMING SESSIONS WITHOUT THEM.

Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control our swimming session had to be cancelled this week – so we will have to try and catch up with some more lengths next week. Thank you for checking in to the blog and watch out for next weeks installment!!