All,
One of my friend's kids, a 10 year old boy who started swimming about a year ago, is really struggling with his racing start in at least two fundamental ways:
Diving flat to near belly flop,
Complete fear of diving off a starting block
Though I don't coach professionally, I did teach each of my own kids to dive, using things like the following in addition to just building a dive from the basics:
Diving through a hula hoop (e.g., get your body to enter through the same narrow hole in the water)
Diving over an extended bar (e.g., a dive is as much about going up and out as it is about getting into the water)
I tried working with this kid last weekend and none of the drills or techniques I'd used with my own kids seemed to help him. I'm confident we can get over #2 above once I can get him to do a decent start from the side of the pool, but I'm wondering if anyone can point me to some video links that both he and I could look at, videos showing both drills/practice techniques to help 'build' a dive and great starts.
