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Ontario Swim Academy serving ‘massive talent pool’

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By Nathan Sager

Developing long-untapped potential – whether in a person or Canada’s most populous province – is a process. Andrew (Andi) Manley, who relocated from England to Canada on Oct. 1 to become head coach of the new Ontario Swim Academy, can vouch for that.

“First and foremost, the centre and environment, arguably, has got to be one of the best training facilities in the world,” says Manley, whose past pool protégés include England’s Abbie Wood, a European Games champion in women’s 400-metre individual medley. “Not only in terms of the pools, but the high-performance gyms and the sports science and sports medicine provisions that are on-site.

“The environment they are swimming in every single day is high-performance, elite. You also have Ben Titley’s HPC [High Performance Centre – Ontario, which is also based at TPASC]. We’re trying to paint this picture of what the elite is about. We’re trying to say ‘this is the norm, this is a daily occurrence for us. We have a job to do, let’s make it happen.’

“Since I started in October, I’ve observed there is a massive talent pool in the GTA and in Ontario,” Manley adds. “Our aim with the Academy is to help allow for a progression from outstanding age group performances to feed in through to the Swimming Canada High Performance Centres across the country – to give Canada better results internationally.”

The OSA is in its early stages. Manley’s seven-swimmer coterie includes 18-year-old Josée Barrette, who recently helped the University of Toronto Varsity Blues pull off the team-title double at the Canadian Interuniversity Sport championships. Five others, including U of T recruit Hannah Genich, gravitated over in search of a new training venue.

“We’re in the early stages,” Manley says. “We have a daily training environment with seven swimmers at the moment. The other part of it is to offer other kids from across Ontario the chance to spend between two and five days at a time in the environment, use the support services, in order to enhance their training opportunities. Time will tell whether that has a knock-on effect into the other HPCs in Canada.”

‘Building partnerships’

Manley emphasizes the OSA is trying to build on the good works already taking place at the club level. Concomitantly, the academy is more reliant on word-of-mouth, and self-recruitment.

“What we’re not doing is going out and actively recruiting the athletes – we want to work with the coaches, not being a threat to what they do in their club programs. We’re doing it on a basis where people are approaching us and we’re helping. From that, we hope that it will evolve into getting more applications from the athletes.

“If I had arrived in October as a foreigner coming in and tried to recruit the best swimmers around… that is just not what I am about,” Manley adds. “I’m trying to work with coaches and being proactive and building partnerships. It will be win-win for both athletes and our clubs.”

The OSA meshes with Swimming Canada’s general objective of encouraging potential Olympians to remain in Canada for their development. Case in point: Genich, 17, was scrolling through NCAA options until her OSA experience led to her deciding to study and swim at U of T.

“I was pretty set on going to the States and then I met Andi, and started training with Andi,” says Genich, a Port Hope, Ont., native. “I just love it. I just love it there … The training environment is always positive. It really helps that there are individualized workouts, since of course not everybody swims the same events. It really helps that Andi figures out what we each need to work on.”

“I realized that all of the resources that they have here is exactly what I need.”

Genich relates that in one of her long-course meets this season – “a meet that wasn’t about looking to go best times, just get me into long-course” – she ended up matching her 200-m backstroke time from the 2015 Team Canada Trials.

“I’ve had best times in all my events, and my improvement is just spiking,” she says.

With a goal of keeping more swimmers developing in their home country, Swimming Canada is promoting the world-class daily training environments offered within Canada, which include the OSA and the HPC-Ontario.

“A lot of high school kids, they see the natural progression to go to study in the U.S.,” Manley says. “I want to break that down and say ‘that is a good option, but there are other options,’ ” such as the OSA and HPC-Ontario.

That is in keeping with making sure the impact of the Pan Ams goes beyond having some nice-looking facilities. Having the 2015 multi-sport games unfold before her certainly made an impression on an ambitious teen such as Genich.

“It was definitely inspiring,” Genich says. “And it made me want to work harder so that maybe one day I could be one of the athletes.”

In addition to its proximity to the U of T-Scarborough campus, the OSA has a partnership with West Hill Collegiate Institute, which supports the unique needs of high performance athletes to pursue a high-level education while maintaining an intensive training and competition schedule.

For more information on the OSA or to apply, please contact: Darin Muma, Performance Programs Manager for Swim Ontario at [email protected] or (416) 426-7223.