Our story

Every length counts.

The name came from the years our head coach spent swimming lengths that counted for nothing.

A swimmer alone in a lane, mid-length, fins waiting on the deck

Before

A lot of metres, and no reason.

Omar swam competitively for years, and swam a great deal of volume. What he did not get was an explanation. Nobody sat him down and said what a set was for, or why this week looked like that, or what any of it was supposed to produce on race day.

The work piled up. So did the injuries. And the results stopped matching the effort he was putting in, which is a particular kind of demoralising. You cannot train harder than you already are, and nobody can tell you what else to change.

He reached a good level anyway. But when he wanted to go further, he could not find anyone willing to go through the journey with him properly, on the level of one swimmer and their actual problem. He came out the other side of it with a difficult relationship with the sport, and a very clear idea of what had been missing.

SWEEP coaches and swimmers in matching white SWEEP tees, arms around each other

Why SWEEP

So no length is wasted.

SWEEP is the academy he needed at seventeen. Every set has a stated purpose, and the swimmer hears it before they push off. Every swimmer gets their own plan, because not everyone here wants the same thing and pretending otherwise is how you lose people.

A night session: swimmers in the lanes, kit on the deck, a coach standing over the lane

No junk metres

Volume is not the point. If a set does not make you faster, it does not go on the board. That is where the name comes from.

You are told why

Before the main set, the coach says what it trains. After a race, you sit with the splits and work out what happened. Nobody swims a mystery set.

Your own journey

Not everyone is chasing the same time. We take each swimmer's goals as their own and build the season around them.

What we actually see

It does not stay in the pool.

The swimmers get faster, and the numbers for that are on the proof page. But the change the coaches talk about among themselves is a different one.

Swimmers arrive and, over a season or two, become people who understand what they are doing and why. They get wiser about their own bodies. They start enjoying the sport more rather than less, which is not what usually happens to teenagers in competitive swimming. And it turns up outside the water: in how they handle school, work and each other.

That is the part we are actually proud of, and it is the reason the academy exists in the shape it does.

Four SWEEP swimmers smiling up from the pool wall

Whoever loves something does it extremely well.

Omar Elewa, Head Coach

Who is coaching

The people on the deck.

Every coach at SWEEP swam competitively, and several raced internationally. So the coaches know what a swimmer is going through on a bad night, and the corrections are specific.

Meet the coaches →
Coach Ali Hany with his arm round a grinning SWEEP swimmer, both giving a thumbs-up

Your first length is free.

We coach swimmers from 12 up who want to race. The first session is free, and we will tell you honestly what we think afterwards.

Book a free assessment