Many families are interested in Recreational Diving. Recreational Diving allows children to have fun, learn and enjoy the sport without the pressure of competition. This is a great way to start out Diving. But there are some drawbacks when you attend a Diving program that offers only recreational diving. Diving programs that only offer only recreational diving restricts your child’s progress.
Recreational only programs restrict your child’s progress because:
- The experience and training of recreational coaches is generally very limited
- Next, if a diver would like to try competition in the future they will need to switch Diving programs to be able to attend competition.
Starting with a program that has both recreational and competitive Diving allows your child to start in a program that does not have a lot of competitive pressure and helps them to learn the fundamentals of the sport correctly. Also, if in the future, they would like to compete,
- Programs with Competitive Diving have much more experienced coaches
- They can stay with the same club and the same coaches and be able to experience the excitement of competition.
Once your child has learned about the sport, has some experience and is excited to try new things, there are some great benefits to competition.
- It allows children to overcome their fears and build their courage
- It allows children to demonstrate their skills
- It allows divers and children to learn about competition in a friendly environment
- It allows divers to work together as a team and build relationships.
So, remember when you start off with a diving program, the first few weeks will be instrumental in how they learn and what they are capable of doing months and years into the future. If they learn bad habits it will be extremely difficult for them to change those bad habits months, or even years, in the future.
Upstate Diving offers both a recreational program and a competitive program. If, after moving through the recreational program, divers are interested in advancing their skills and enjoying the fun of competition, competition is available to them.