Blog 1

At College International Sainte-Anne, the college that I am attending, we have the opportunity to create and complete an internship of our choice. Being a high performance swimming athlete, I didn’t want to travel over sea, to another country, or city. Therefore, I decided to stay in Montreal and do my internship within my own swim club, the Pointe-Claire Swim Club. This will allow me to accomplish my internship and my research paper, while keeping focused on my training and improving my performances. During my internship, I will try to determine what makes a swim club successful at a high performance level. To do that, I will conduct interviews, ask athletes to complete surveys and analyse data. The people that I’m going to interview are the head coaches of different swim clubs across Quebec. I will be mainly asking their opinion about what makes a swim club successful and, also, how they are proceeding within their own swim club to make it successful. The first coach that I have plan to interview is Martin Gingras, who is the head coach of the Pointe-Claire Swim Club. I see him on a daily basis, therefore, making it easy to interview him. If everything goes as planned, I will interview him tomorrow. For the survey’s, I will ask high performance swimmers (by this I mean swimmers who compete at a national and international level) to complete it. I will ask them what they believe makes a swim club successful, giving them 6 possible answers: traditions of the club, budget of the club, quality of the coaches/staff, talent of the athletes, ability to recruit new athletes, and development of the younger swimmers. Then I will ask them to place these answers in order of 1 to 6, where 1 is the most important. So far, I have 7 high performance athletes (2 girls, 5 boys) between 17 and 24 years old, who have taken the survey. They were all swimmers that I know personally and they were all very cooperative in the process. Here are some pictures of the athletes who completed the survey:

As for the data, I will attempt to acquire the annual budgets of the best clubs in Quebec for the past 10 years, as well as the results of the Canadian senior national swimming competition over the last 10 years. This will allow me to see which teams the top swimmers are coming from. To this point, I know that I can obtain the budget of the Pointe-Claire Swim Club, however I’m not sure if I will be able to procure the data from the past 10 years. Also, I’m not sure if can get the budget of the other swim clubs as they are all privately owned clubs. As for the competition results, they are easily obtained, I just need to go on swimming.ca and I can find them there. I will keep posting on this blog to keep you informed of how my internship is going. Until then here is a picture of Martin Gingras and I, the head coach of Pointe-Claire Swim Club: