Guest Blogger Edward McCutcheon from BULSCA tells us about the Lifesaving Sport Taster Session.

After my last blog post about Barking & Dagenham Aquatics Club (BDAC) Redfins’ visit to the London Aquatics Centre prior to it’s opening, we achieved the goal of getting Lifesaving back at the venue! We held our first Lifesaving Sport taster session at the 50m competition pool last week, which was a free two hour event with guest trainers from the University of Bristol Lifesaving Club and a special appearance from Zara Williams, the GB Lifesaving Athlete.

In the usual university lifesaving taster session format, we had four stations covering line throw, carrying a manikin, competition fins and rescue tubes and diving practice. After an hour of rotating around, Zara demonstrated a manikin carry, Bristol a manikin carry relay, and we held both a manikin carry and a freestyle race amongst the attendees. There was a great mix of people in attendance, including young lifesavers from local clubs, our swimmers and members of Survive & Save classes. We think this was the first lifesaving sport event at the pool!

We are hoping to go back on other occasions (when our swimming club is at galas) with our own Lifesaving Sport squad and other guest clubs to train / have practice friendlies alongside. If there’s enough interest to run a Lifesaving Sport squad with the Aquatics Centre as its home, we’ll approach GLL and see what we can book!

Otherwise, the club is now ramping up to finish Survive & Save awards by the end of the term, and preparing for our first home Lifesaving Competition on 12th July in our own brand new pool complete with a lovely 10 lane 25m with electronic timing – why not come along?