Shopping for swim equipment is always a challenge. I recommend you act as a team in negotiating for the best swim suit prices. One very frustrating part of the business is that suits go in and out of production, so ask your distributor or the company who makes the suits about their schedule before you put your whole team in a suit.

    If you want a company to sponsor your Swim-A-thon or give you a free pace clock once in a while, you need to negotiate that from a position of strength. If your families are buying only by price at various vendors, you won’t have as much leverage. But some swim shops don’t give to get anyway -- so you need to plan for what you need each year and strive to get your best annual deal in a contract.

    This part of the site is purposely striving to be inclusive, so you make team and individual decisions intelligently and not just because some distributor or manufacturer is a sponsor, etc. If you find a great distributor or manufacturer that isn’t on this site, please let the webmaster know. If, on the other hand, you get terrible service or a product isn’t living up to the promise on the package, there should soon be a blog on this site to discuss that. It might give you leverage! Of course you might note great service and prices too.

    Coaches: Equipment that helps your swimmers swim faster is in a separate category here. We will also try to include links to scientific studies and anecdotes from you and other successful coaches as to the value and modality of different kids of training equipment. The world is changing quickly what with some of the new swim suits more costly than the monthly pay of some age group coaches! Let’s help each other to keep up on those technical changes and to share what really works in helping our kids have the best chance to reach their dreams.