9. Judging Distance From the Wall

Video Transcription: I put this example in here because it’s kind of like that long pause before you hit the wall. You can see the head comes up and there’s just a delay between this final stroke and then his Flip. So, this is a Swimmer. That’s not too far away. This is not a T-Rex arm. This Swimmer is not too close. This is a Swimmer who is too far away that they must Glide themselves into the wall. If this is done disjointedly, like it doesn’t feel like it’s one fluid motion and it doesn’t look like it’s one fluid motion that can be bad for the Swimmer if this is happening in a race. For practice type scenarios, a lot of Swimmers do these types of Turns where they glide into the wall and so the time between their last stroke and the actual Flip itself is more delayed than when they are racing but you want to keep an eye out for that because Turns do have to be consistent. 

There’s something called a non-continuous Turn. If a Turn doesn’t look like all the Motions are basically bookshelfed up against each other, stroke and Turn judges can get a little disjointed about Turns that are looking non-continuous. The way you can tell that he’s going to pause for a long while is you can look at the distance that he starts initiating that last stroke. The last stroke is halfway between the flags to the wall within the color of the lane line. He’s a little bit taller than me, but he’s not a huge kid that he kind of has to pull himself into the wall, Glide for a second, and then boom, initiates the Somersault from there. Another key reason to work stroke counts is to avoid not just being close, but also being too far away from the wall.