The City of Wolverhampton Council has invested in Club SWIMTAG systems and lane displays to enhance its swim offer and encourage higher participation levels.

The Council’s leisure portfolio, branded WV Active, includes three leisure centre, two with pools, Bilston-Bert Williams and Central Baths and both completed their SWIMTAG install this month.

In addition to the standard Club SWIMTAG system, which enables swimmers to log and track session activity and get involved in a variety of cloud-based challenges, The Council has also invested in lane displays which offer the added benefit of delivering real time information on session activity direct to swimmers on poolside.

Talking about the install, Sean McBurney, WV Active Manager, says: “SWIMTAG brings much needed gym style innovation to poolside, creating a more engaging and motivating experience for swimmers. In addition to enabling swimmers to seamlessly log and track their activity, recording data such as session duration, number and type of strokes plus the number of lengths completed, the system also creates opportunities to get involved in a variety of individual or team based ‘battles’. This offers those who want it, a chance to become a part of a swim community, introducing sociability to an otherwise very solitary activity.”

“I’m really looking forward to running some inter-site challenges” continues Sean. “Swimming remains Britain’s most popular activity but, despite the widely recognised mental and physical benefits associated with regular involvement, participation is in decline. We need to reignite the nation’s enthusiasm for swimming and technologies like SWIMTAG sit at the heart of the solution.

“Here at WV Active, community swimming remains an important part of our leisure offering. Swimming is an activity most people, regardless of age, gender or physical ability can enjoy and we intend to continue to invest in making swimming an appealing activity for all.

“Our ambition is to encourage as many of our swim users as possible to create a SWIMTAG account and give it a go. If we can do this, I believe we will see a significant increase in both casual swim usage and swim membership.”

To use SWITAG, swimmers simply collect a wristband from reception ahead of their session. The band is returned to reception on exit and individuals can then access session data stored in their personal online account from any device with internet access.

Kieran Sloyan, Managing Director at 222 Sports, creators of SWIMTAG, adds: “SWIMTAG is now available at over 200 sites and engages more than 82,000 swimmers. Every month, more than 3400 swimmers get involved in our challenges, with this number growing month on month. We are really excited to welcome WV Active pools into our network and will continue to work closely with the team over the next few months to ensure they get the most out of their install.”

To find out more about how SWIMTAG could improve your swim offering, contact the team now on 01225 282117.

SWIMTAG have teamed up with Swimathon to help encourage its user network to participation in the world’s biggest charity swim on Friday April 27 – Sunday April 29 2018.

The activation will see Swimathon training plans uploaded to the SWIMTAG system and promoted to more than 82,000 SWIMTAG users across the UK.

Kieran Sloyan, MD of 222 Sports says: “Swimathon is a fantastic event which raises money for two very worthy charities. We are very happy to be able to encourage our users to get involved in the Swimathon Challenge. Being able to offer training plans provided by Jolyon Finck, Swimathon Head Coach, Swimathon will also, hopefully, have a positive effect on challenge completion rates, leading to record-breaking fundraising for Cancer Research UK and Marie Curie. Many of the pools we are partnered with, already get involved in Swimathon so helping our users to better engage makes perfect sense.”

In the 30 years since it began, Swimathon has raised £48 million, benefiting 36 different charities. The aim this year is to raise a further £2 million, to reach an overall fundraising milestone of £50 million. Speaking about the activation with SWIMTAG, Anthony Kendall OBE, Chairman of The Swimathon Foundation says: “SWIMTAG is a fantastic training aid that encourages swimmers of all abilities to swim more regularly. Swimathon is delighted to work with SWIMTAG to provide their users with the opportunity to access Official Swimathon training plans, therefore providing a motivation to take on the world’s biggest annual fundraising swim.”

The SWIMTAG Team will be exhibiting at Elevate in the Excel London on the 9th and 10th of May 2018. You can find us at stand A07 on the right hand side of the event hall. We will be presenting our latest web updates and hardware. Existing clients are invited to book one-on-one training session slots with our team by emailing Denne e-postadressen er beskyttet mot programmer som samler e-postadresser. Du må aktivere javaskript for å kunne se den.. We look forward to seeing you there! Further details and registration is available on the elevate website: https://www.elevatearena.com

TMActive pool users in Kent have been enjoying a friendly inter-pool battle, thanks to new features developed by SWIMTAG.

The SWIMTAG challenge features have been enhanced to make it possible for teams across multiple sites, to compete in battles, with all data being collated by the cloud based SWIMTAG system.

The live challenge link is available here: https://www.swimtag.net/challenge/20239/Niagara-River-Swim

Operators and users are given real time access to battle progress via the SWIMTAG website, helping individuals maintain motivation as they contribute to their team’s total distance each time they put on the SWIMTAG wristband and enter the pool. Battles pitch teams against each other in events such as the 104km ‘Niagara River Swim or 78km ‘Panama Canal’. New battles will be added at regular intervals to ensure regular users remain engaged.

Kieran Sloyan, MD at 222 Sports, developers of SWIMTAG, says: “The benefits of regular swimming are well documented but the challenge operators face is keeping swimmers motivated and engaged. Lane swimming in its purest form can be a lonely, uninspiring activity. We have developed these challenge features to give people more of a reason to get in the pool, return to the pool and clock up some decent distances.

“SWIMTAG has always offered individual challenges but these new features focus more on enabling teams to compete against each other both at a single site or across multiple sites. This creates a real buzz and gives operators an opportunity to build more of a social community around the pool in a way that hasn’t really been possible in the past.”

TM Active has been amongst the first operators to run an inter-pool battle. Two teams of regular pool users, one at the Larkfield Leisure Centre and one at the Tonbridge Swimming Pool, battled it out to become the first to complete the Niagara River Swim. Team Larkfield was the first to cross the line, clocking up the full combined distance of 104km in 21 days.

Martin Guyton, CEO at TM Active, says: “The battle has become a talking point amongst those competing. The battle also attracted a wide variety of people. Competitor ages ranged from 20 to 61 with a 55 per cent female to 45 per cent male split.

“Over the last decade, gyms have embraced technology in a continuing bid to engage and motivate members through the introduction of entertainment and gamification features. SWIMTAG now enables us to bring similar technology to the pool.

“For the first time, through the implementation of easy to use, digital technology, we can enable swimmers to engage with other swimmers and work together towards a mutual goal. The battle only took a few minutes to set up and once this was done the rest took care of itself, automatically updating team progress from data collected on the swimmers SWIMTAG wristbands. SWIMTAG has already had a positive effect on our swim retention. These new features enhance this and I am looking forward to many more battles ahead!”

All pools offering SWIMTAG are now able to take advantage of these new features which launched in January 2018.

We’re pleased to announce an exciting development in the SWIMTAG Challenge Feature.

As anyone who is familiar with SWIMTAG will know, users have been able to use our Challenge feature to virtually swim iconic routes, such as the English Channel or Strait of Gibraltar in the comfort of their own pool, with SWIMTAG plotting their progress on a virtual map.

Pools have also been able to set up Featured Challenges, inviting all SWIMTAG users to swim the same route at the same time, sometimes as part of a charity swim but often just for fun and we can even plot customised routes for pools who wish to virtually swim a local route.

We’ve now developed the feature even further, so challenges can be completed as a team and teams can even compete against each other to be the first to finish, so you could have Staff v Members, Swim Club v Triathlon Club, or you can just set up teams and have people choose based on their favourite colour!

And the teams don’t even have to be at the same pool. The “Pool Battle” feature means that sites with more than one pool can set up a race between the two centres and have them compete to be the first to finish.

Because the challenges will be easier to complete as part of a team, we’re adding lots more longer routes, such as the Panama Canal (78km) and the Niagara River (108km) with more to follow soon.

Existing pools who would like to set up the new challenge options are welcome to contact us for help.