The first week of the autumn term is the most consequential week in a club swimmer’s year, and almost nobody treats it that way. Squads have been reshuffled, session times have changed, there is a new coach on poolside, and somewhere in the inbox is a gala calendar nobody has read properly yet.
Then, four or five weeks in, a swimmer races for the first time since July and comes out slower than their personal best. That is the moment I get the message: has something gone wrong?
Almost always, no. But what happens between now and Christmas does more to determine whether your child stands on the blocks at Westminster Lodge in January than anything they will do in the spring. Here is what is actually going on.
The season you have just walked into
British club swimming runs on two calendars. Roughly September to December is the short-course season — racing in 25m pools, finishing with the National Winter Championships just before Christmas. Spring and summer are long course, in 50m pools, building to the summer nationals.
The counties sit in the join. The Swim England Hertfordshire County Championships 2027 individual events run on 16, 23, 24 and 30 January 2027, and 6 and 7 February 2027, at Westminster Lodge in St Albans, with the relays on 9 and 16 January. That means the autumn term is the last full block of racing your child gets before the entry deadline. The qualifying window and its closing date are published in the county’s qualifying times document each year — find that date now, and count backwards to see how many realistic attempts your swimmer actually has. It is usually fewer than parents assume.
So the autumn is not a warm-up for the real season. For county purposes, it is the season.
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Check coaching availability →Why the first races back look bad
Two things are happening at once, and they get confused with each other.
The first is straightforward detraining. A swimmer who had three or four weeks genuinely off in August has lost aerobic conditioning. That comes back quickly, usually within a few weeks of consistent sessions, and it is not the interesting part.
The second is that they have changed pool. A swimmer whose summer ended in a 50m pool and whose autumn starts in a 25m pool is now racing an event with a completely different shape. A 100m in a 25m pool has three turns. The same race in a 50m pool has one. If the turns are rusty — and after a summer of long course they generally are — the September time can look worse even though the swimmer is not slower.
A slow September time is a diagnosis, not a verdict. The question is not “why are they slower”, it is “which part of the race got slower” — and in short course the answer is usually the wall.
This is why the split sheet matters more than the final time in the autumn. If the clean swimming looks the same and the time has gone backwards, the wall is where it went.
In short course, the wall is the race
This is the part most parents have never been told, and it changes how you watch the autumn.
When researchers break a short-course race into its component segments, the turn segments — the approach into the wall, the turn itself and the underwater push-off — stop being a detail and become the largest single component of the race. In a study of high-level male swimmers over short course 100m breaststroke, turns accounted for 44.3 per cent of the finishing time, more than clean swimming at 38.9 per cent, with the start at 11.4 per cent and the finish at 5.4 per cent.
Breaststroke is the extreme case, because the pull-out is long and the free-swimming speed is low. It is less lopsided in freestyle. But the direction is the same in every stroke, and the reason is simply arithmetic: shorten the pool and you double the number of walls without changing the distance. Work on European elite short-course swimmers has found that turn performance is one of the factors separating higher-ranked swimmers from lower-ranked ones, and that the consistency of turn times across a race matters as much as the best single one.
For a club swimmer this has a very practical consequence. Between September and December, a second found at the wall is easier to find than a second found in the stroke — and it counts for exactly the same on the qualifying sheet. A swimmer who spends the autumn fixing a lazy approach, a slow rotation and a shallow, short push-off can take meaningful time off without their stroke changing at all.
Underwaters are the same story. Every swimmer is allowed 15m off each wall. Most age-group swimmers use somewhere between five and eight of them, and surface into a stroke that is slower than the push-off they just abandoned. In a 25m pool they give that away three times per 100m instead of once.
If you want a concrete place to start, that is exactly what the starts, dives and turns clinic exists for, and it is the single highest-return technical session in the short-course block.
What a squad move actually means
September is also when swimmers move up, and squad moves are routinely misread in both directions.
A move up is a coaching judgement about whether a swimmer can handle the load of the next group — the volume, the session times, the intensity, the early mornings. It is not primarily a statement about talent, and it is not a promise of faster times. In fact the first eight to ten weeks after a squad move frequently produce worse racing, because the swimmer is absorbing a training increase they have never done before. That is a normal adaptation curve, not a mistake.
A swimmer who is held back is likewise not being written off. The most common honest reason is maturity and physical readiness rather than ability, and moving a young swimmer into a load they cannot yet recover from is the reliable way to produce a burnt-out fourteen-year-old.
What matters far more than which lane they are in is whether the programme in front of them matches the swimmer. Our competitive swimming coaching sets out where one-to-one work fits without cutting across what the club coach is doing — the aim is always to support the squad programme, never to run a competing one.
How to read the autumn gala calendar
Work backwards, not forwards.
- Find the county qualifying window and its closing date in the published qualifying times document. Everything else hangs off it.
- Count the realistic attempts. Not every meet your club lists is a genuine chance at every event. You need licensed meets at the right level, in the right events, with enough recovery between them. Three or four good attempts beats seven scrappy ones.
- Pick the target events early. A swimmer chasing a time in four strokes across six distances is chasing nothing. Two or three events, raced repeatedly, is how times actually come down.
- Leave a gap before the closing date. Every year, someone’s last chance is a meet that gets cancelled, clashes with a school trip, or arrives in the middle of a chest infection. Plan the attempt you need at least one meet before you need it.
What to do, and what not to do
Four things worth doing this term:
- Read the splits, not just the final time. Ask the club coach which segment moved. If it is the turns, you have found your autumn project.
- Protect the sleep. A squad move usually adds early mornings. Adding early mornings without adding earlier bedtimes is how a good season quietly falls apart in November.
- Fix one thing. One technical priority per term, chosen with the coach. Not five.
- Get the wall right before Christmas. It is the cheapest time available in a 25m pool.
And four to avoid:
- Don’t panic about the September time. Compare it to last September, not to last July.
- Don’t chase every meet on the calendar. Racing tired produces slow times and sour swimmers.
- Don’t coach from the balcony. You will get better information by asking your child what the coach said than by telling them what you saw.
- Don’t ask for a squad move as a reward. Ask what the swimmer needs to demonstrate to earn one, then help them demonstrate it.
The honest summary
The autumn term is short, it is short course, and it ends in the entry deadline for the county championships in January. That combination makes it the highest-leverage block of the year — and the leverage sits in an unglamorous place, at the wall rather than in the stroke.
If your swimmer came back in September slower than they left in July, that is normal. If you cannot tell where the time went, that is the question worth answering, and video analysis will answer it faster than another month of guessing. For swimmers working towards a first county qualifying time, our junior swimmer coaching is built around exactly this block of the year.
Find the closing date. Count the attempts. Fix the wall.