Welcome to Swimming Ideas

Training, guides, resources for Aquatic Professionals and their teams.

Click Explore for our FREE swimming games and challenges list!

This list of over 100 swimming games and activities are great for swimming lessons, swim teams, and anyone looking to expand their teaching toolbox for better lessons.

Click "explore" to look at the entire list for FREE!


Join our FREE community of Aquatic Professionals!

From swim instructors to managers and directors, we're here to grow together!

About Swimming Ideas

From daily lesson plans to broader training for new hires and swim instructors, Swimming Ideas provides excellent training and community opportunities for people working in aquatics looking to make their swimming instruction better. 

Why You Should Join

We want to make your life easier and better with tools and resources to reduce prep time, ensure quality training, and teach better swimming.

We constantly update our material with ongoing evaluations, assessments, and lesson-tested adjustments. 

Learn from our mistakes, capitalize on our failures, and take the best elements from our programming to use in your own lessons or instruction.



You want better lessons and an easier way to train your staff.

We can help.


Let’s make swimming lessons better.

Our goal is to provide simple tools to make your swim program fun and effective.


We believe in loving, caring, trust-building teaching to produce fun and effective swimming lessons. 

Our entire program focuses on building trust, being caring, and providing a loving environment for children and adults to thrive. 

We do not advocate for traumatic swimming experiences like forced dunking, forced un-assisted jumps, or surprise dunks that catch an impressionable swimmer off-guard to “teach them how to recover” in the name of “safety.” 

We believe that safety comes from repeated exposure, training, learning, and confidence building. 

Join us in teaching with love, care, and respect for our participants.


You will learn how to become a better swim instructor.

Read articles and listen to podcasts where we interview industry professionals. Get fresh ideas from other programs, and learn from unique challenges. Follow guides for better language, effective teaching techniques, and how to run your lessons.


You will be able to train a large staff quickly and effectively to teach swimming well.

Park Districts and large programs usually hire a large untrained young staff every summer. Make that process easier. Give your new instructors easy to follow lesson plans following a simplified level structure that produces results. Not every new teen hire is going to be a phenomenal teacher, but we can raise the minimum by giving them a plan. Use our management guides to make running your program easier too.

Make annual training easier.



You will manage your students quicker and easier

Large swimming populations mean tedium. Hundreds of evaluation forms to fill out, a large staff to manage, and a changing class schedule across multiple locations. Are you frustrated by letting your teenagers come up with a new excel sheet to track swimmer progress every year? You need a simple, easy, accessible tool that lets you track swimmer progress, emails your evaluation forms, and manages make-up lessons. Take attendance every lesson quickly, and give detailed feedback to parents. Our online lesson management is custom built for swim lessons and swim teams.


You will learn fresh ideas

Swimming has a large diverse web of approaches. We explore, test, and learn from others around the world. Listen to interviews with Aquatic Professionals and learn how they solved their problems and what they do really well. Our podcast looks at swim lessons and swim teams with a desire to improve. Join our conversation and learn something new

Use the best resources to teach effective and fun swimming lessons

Have you ever started working at a pool and been told to jump in and teach a swim lesson? Were you given any training or direction? Maybe the manager gave you their level sheet with a bunch of checkboxes on it. Did you even know what the levels were called? Polliwog? Level 1?  When you started teaching did anyone talk about an effective way to teach going underwater? Did someone review with you a couple great songs to play and how to engage a whole class? Perhaps you were shown how to hold a child when doing front glides so you can gradually get them to go underwater while establishing an emotional fun connection. Maybe not.

We can make swimming lessons better together

I want you to have a great resource to use whenever you’re unsure how to do something in swimming lessons. When you are looking to train your new summer staff, or get your school year employees ready to teach, think of Swimming Ideas.

You can take advantage of all the swim games, lesson plans, and tactics we use to teach great swim lessons.  If there is anything missing, or something you would like to add, please send me an email: [email protected] or connect with me on Twitter: @swimmingideas.

Together, we can work on teaching better swim lessons!

Thank you!

Thank you to the assistant coaches, swim instructors, and participants over the last 30 years that have contributed to our growth and development. This is has been a labor of love and sharing intended to make the arcane nuance of swimming easier for all to access and do well. 

We want to be the beacon of light that empowers our youth to grow into productive excellent citizens. 


Join the
Aquatic Professional Membership
for all of Swimming Ideas' training materials and lesson plans!