Alison Sheppard MBE and Gary Vandermeulen are co-owners of the Sheppard Swim School. Their combined knowledge in swimming is formidable. In addition to the Sheppard Swim School, they also run the Phoenix Aquatics Swim Team. Alison is first woman in the world to swim at 5 Olympic Games and is now a qualified personal trainer. We teach children from 3yrs of age in our 'Nemo' groups where we invite parents to join in to assist with the transition into group lessons. After Nemo our swimmers begin our own swim lesson programme designed by Gary Vandermeulen (Olympic swimmer 1988, Olympic Coach 2000 & 2004) and updated regularly with improvements from our instructors. Our swimming programme introduces breaststroke kick earlier and dolphin kick earlier than other lesson programmes because these movements are very natural for young swimmers. Our levels 1-6 gradually take children through the learning process of all swimming strokes: Frontcrawl, Backcrawl, Breaststroke and Butterfly. In levels 7 & 8 our lesson time increases to 40minutes (from 30minutes) and we begin to fine tune swimming strokes. We do not currently publish our syllabus on our web site due to the fact that our syllabus in the past has been copied by our competition.
Our private lesson clients, who been working with Gary Vandermeulen, have had incredible success including: full scholarships at US Universities, qualifying for the Commonwealth Games, winning UK Schools Games and won Scottish Age group championship events. Many swimmers have seen improvements that are remarkable: one swimmer improved 8 seconds over a 50m event.
