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United Kingdom 
After two years in development with operator partner, Places for People Leisure (PfPL), 222 Sports, creator of SWIMTAG, has launched ‘Rule The Pool’, the world’s first, pool-based weekly challenge, designed to engage pool users and encourage swim participation.
The weekly timed swim simply requires participants to register via the SWIMTAG website, don a SWIMTAG wristband and swim 400 metres (16 lengths of a 25-metre pool) as fast as they can. The session is automatically logged by the wristband and the effort is ranked, appearing in a central, Rule The Pool league table available to view anytime on the SWIMTAG website.
Competitions run every week from Monday to Sunday. At the end of each week, participants receive a personalised email from SWIMTAG, detailing their Rule The Pool competition time, rank and the total number of swimmers who participated that week. The leader board is then cleared and a new competition begins. Participants can complete the competition as many times as they like in a week, with SWIMTAG automatically selecting the fastest time to appear in the leader board. Having completed one timed swim, many participants repeat the experience week after week, in an attempt to improve their rank and time achieved in previous weeks.
Rule The Pool, originally developed via funding from Sport England, has been refined over a period of almost two years in partnership with leading leisure management company, PfPL. The competition is already available across all 72 PfPL managed pools and attracts around 1,000 participants every week. From this month, Rule The Pool will be available to swimmers at all SWIMTAG pools across the UK, with a plan for global rollout in the future.
Mark Haslam, Head of Swimming and Sport at PfPL, says: “Two years ago, we recognised the need to offer an accessible pool challenge which would engage a wide spectrum of ages and abilities to attract more people into the water. SWIMTAG was already installed in all our pools, so when we mentioned our ambition to Kieran and the team at 222 Sports they set about developing a cloud-based competition open to all, titled Rule The Pool.”
Kieran Sloyan, MD at 222 Sports, adds: “Since launching Rule The Pool across the PfPL estate, almost 3,000 individuals have completed at least one timed swim. We are now very excited to open the challenge to pool users across country who have access to SWIMTAG, enabling swimmers to compete against others up and down the country. All management and communication is administered by SWIMTAG, meaning no extra input from the operator is required to run this competition.”
Rule The Pool is available to all SWIMTAG operator partners free of charge. Sloyan adds: “Rule The Pool has the potential to create a global swim community and encourage literally thousands of people into the water. 400 metres is a do-able distance for most recreational swimmers, keeping the challenge inclusive and driving as much participation as possible.”