Nothing has a greater influence on the quality of children’s sports than the excellence of the coaching. Unfortunately, well qualified and knowledgeable youth coaches are hard to find.

PDST coaches are the cornerstone of our swimming program. Our coaches are experienced national level coaches as well as a competitive swimmers from youth. Both Coach PeiYong Li and Coach XiaoWei Xu were either national or provincial champions during their competitive swimming era in China. Following university graduation specializing in physical education and coaching, they became excellent and proven swimming coaches with demonstrated ability to identify, teach, develop, and train swimmers of various ages and ability levels through their 30 years of swimming coaching career in China. Their consistent deep understanding and caring attitude towards their swimmers have been the keys to the successes in their careers. In addition, Coach PeiYong Li and Coach Ren Xu are also experienced managers. Both gained their respective managing experience through professional training and through their work in China and in US. Their management skills will provide our team with a sound foundation in operation and in turn provide a positive, well-organized training environment for the team. 

The coaching staff defines success as improvement in four areas; positive attitude, effort, skill mastery, and time improvement for each swimmer. We believe that there are no good or bad swimmers, but rather many swimmers who are at different levels of development. Our aim is to provide a successful developmental experience for all who enter our team.

Our team is a US Swimming year round competitive swim team offering high quality professional coaching and technique instruction for all ages and abilities. The goal of the PDST is to provide every swimmer an opportunity to improve swimming skills and achieve success at his or her level of ability, from novice to international competitor.

In brief, our team will rely on several key attributes of training in daily practice. We will use advanced swimming training theories as the foundation for practice, improve basic physical conditions of each swimmer, teach and apply excellent stroke techniques, and focus on controlled training intensity and swimming efficiency in all practices. A good coach will be able to identify and develop each swimmer’s physical potential and winning mentality through practice. Analyzing effective swimming training, Coach PeiYong Li wrote in an published research article: “Swimming practice is about thousands of the technical replicates of the stroke. A coach absolutely needs to ensure the correct stroke technique is formed (taught) and practiced in each training to improve” and “It will NOT be difficult to imagine the consequence of the hundreds, and thousands repetitive LESS OPTIMAL strokes practiced by a swimmer and that should NOT have happened to the swimmer.” Accordingly, the trainings in our team will focus on swimming foundations, improving the stroke techniques and use correct strokes with the training intensity (efficiency). All of these will be extended at various levels into the practice groups, accomplished using both dry-land exercise and in-water practice. Improved times in competitive meets will come from better stroke techniques and higher swimming efficiency in trainings. Simply put, there are two ways to improve swimming time, increased power and/or reduced water resistance. These two parameters can be achieved with good supervised practice and improved techniques. In our training, we will deploy various methods to achieve these aims.

“Swimming training is a science as well as an art,” describes Coach PeiYong Li. Swimming training needs to be science-based, but also needs to be individualized in order to maximize each swimmer’s unique potential. Our coaches will gradually individualize training plans according to the physiological, physical, and mental characteristics of each swimmer in our team. We will also adjust our plans by carefully monitoring the recovery of each swimmer after the training to ensure we achieve desired practice aims. 

Each new swimmer will be placed in the practice group best suited for him or her, so that each swimmer can enjoy some degree of success in a relatively short time. Since swimming is an individual sport, each child will perform differently, but you can be sure that your child will get out of it as much as he or she puts into it.