Of all the performance directors in Scotland, few are currently as content as Ally Whike. Scottish Swimming’s performance director has spent that last few years watching his sport going from strength-to-strength with Olympic, World and European medals having been collected with impressive regularity.
The most recent success story was the Commonwealth Games earlier this year, which saw Scottish swimmers pick up nine medals, as well and two medals from divers.
Whike though, is keen to point out that the spectacular successes that Scottish swimmers are currently experiencing are far from accidental, and neither has the health of the sport improved over-night.
Rather, this has been a decades-long project and it is a system that is constantly being reassessed to ensure things continue to improve.
“The main reason things are going so well is that we’ve built a system over a number of years that has allowed athletes and coaches to follow their own path and progress the way they feel is best for them,” said Whike.
“We’ve put a lot of investment into coaching specifically and into programmes and that has borne some really good fruit.
"This is a good 30 years worth of work to get to this point. If we go back 30 years, it was about realising that the sport wasn’t in a great place. It got to the point that if we wanted to be better, we had to make changes.
"It’s built around four key points – having great people involved, great partners, responsibility and planning.”
What has been so encouraging for Whike is the vast majority of Scottish swimmers remain in Scotland, feeling no need to move abroad to further their careers. And with a number of Scottish swimmers challenging for medals at the very highest level, they have proven that the training programmes in Scotland can rival those anywhere in the world.
“Historically, athletes maybe felt that once you got to a certain point, you had to move away and train elsewhere but our aspiration has always been that kids should be able to learn to swim in Scotland, they should be able to be developed in Scotland and they should be able to do their performance training in Scotland," he said.
"And I think we’re showing now that’s possible and it’s happening regularly – to a point that we’re actually attracting swimmers back who have moved away and swimmers from other nations here.
"We have Olympic medallists like Duncan Scott and Stephen Milne who have gone through all three steps in Scotland and that’s great to show that we can do that.”
With athletes like Hannah Miley, Scott, Milne, Ross Murdoch and a number of others amongst the best in the world, there are few better role models. And while many of Scotland’s top swimmers still have a number of years left in their international careers, Whike is confident that when they do eventually hang up their goggles, there is the talent coming through to fill any gaps.
“It’s the responsibility of the top end of the sport that things are feeding into the bottom end, I think that’s absolutely crucial," he said.
"And I think that’s what lends itself to developing a strong sport. If we don’t have a strong pathway then we don’t have upward pressure and so then you don’t get that top level of performance.
"In performance sport, you never know who’s going to make it but in the pathway, I do think we’ve got some good strength-in-depth and have a number of swimmers who could take on the mantle from those who are at the top right now.”
It is an exciting summer coming up for Scotland’s swimmers, with the sport’s European Championships taking place in August in Glasgow as part of Glasgow 2018. And with a whopping ten Scots in the GB team, Whike is excited to potentially see a number of them pick up medals on home soil.
“23 percent of the British team is Scottish, which is fantastic and of that 10, nine of the ten train in Scotland, which is great,” he said.
“Clearly though, it’s not just about getting on the team, it’s about getting medals too and we’re hopeful that with the group of athletes we’ve got going to Glasgow 2018, they’ll deliver some great performances.”
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