Coaching

Day of Week	Jon	Eli	Sue	Pascal	Nelson
Monday PM	♦			♦
Tuesday AM		♦			♦
Wednesday PM	♦			♦
Thursday AM		♦	♦
Friday AM			♦
Friday PM				♦	♦
Sunday AM	♦

View or Download the 2012 Season Swim Plan (PDF)

Jonathan Smirl (Head Coach)

I am a transplant to Kelowna by way of Victoria, arriving here in 2008 to work on attaining my Certified Exercise Physiologist designation and Masters degree in Human Kinetics.  Eventually I would like to establish a career working in the rehabilitation, medicine or sports medicine fields.

Over the course of my 15-year coaching career, I have been privileged to have worked with many different swimmers and triathletes ranging in age from 3 years old to 80+, introductory swimmers to national level competitors, try-a-tri participants and Ironman Champions and everywhere in between.

As a coach, I am a firm believer in quality over quantity.  As such I like to devote a great deal of time working with swimmers and triathletes on their improving their technique and try to help them develop a solid technical foundation.  My experiences have shown that this is the key to becoming a successful swimmer.

Over the past 2 years, I have thoroughly enjoyed working with the Okanagan Masters Swim Club, and hope that all of our members continue to have a good time training in both our H₂O Centre and wonderful Lake Okanagan.

Eli Dimitrov

Eli has over 15 years of competitive swimming experience including being a former member of the Bulgarian National Swim team.  She has been a swim coach since 1985, when she worked for 5 years with kindergarten and pre-competitive swimmers at the Sofia Sport Development centre in Bulgaria.  In 1990, she moved to Canada and coached with the Milton Marlins in Ontario before proceeding to coach with the University of Calgary swim club before relocating to Kelowna in 2009.

Since becoming a member of the OMSC coaching staff, Eli has been a staple of the OMSC weekday morning workouts for over the past year and as her swimmers can attest, she always finds a way for her swimmers to challenge and push themselves to new heights.

When Eli is not coaching, she usually can be found working her day job as a massage therapist.  As a massage therapist, she is able to utilize the deep understanding of how the human body works from her lifetime involvement in sports to provide clients with the important benefits of massage therapy. Her experiences enable her to identify the main cause of the client’s condition and apply appropriate treatment plan resulting in faster recovery and patient satisfaction.

Sue Morrison

Sue has decades of coaching experience with swimmers and triathletes of all levels (recreational to competitive) and ages (children to adults over 85 years of age). She also serves as Chair of the Central Okanagan Aquatic Society (COAS). COAS served a critical advocacy role in galvanizing community support for the new H2O Adventure and Fitness Centre and continues to play an active role in the Aquatic Advisory Committee. Sue‘s credentials include: NCCP Level 3-Swimming, Level 2 -Athletics:Distance Running and Level 1 -Triathlon.

Sue has coached triathlon for more than 20 years and has devoted much of her time to the Ironman distance. Her athletes includes overall age group winners and finishers and top three Clydesdale category finishes. Sue runs the very successful Kids of Steel triathlon camps as part of the Kelowna Apple Triathlon every year.

Pascal Sutherland

I began swimming at 6 in Ontario as a summer swimmer in Port Credit.  After completing the summer circuit I decided to abandon baseball and soccer and focus primarily on swimming.  I swam competitively with Tomac in Mississauga before moving to Vancouver at the age of 12 and swimming for the Vancouver Dolphins.   I swam with them until just after my 14th birthday when I strained a ligament during the Provincial 200 backstroke final.  It was there that my age group career ended.  I went to a small high school in the US where I turned my attention to golf and tennis.

I become a born again swimmer in Nanaimo at the age of 25 with a masters group that ran out of Frontrunners.  Seven years and 7 masters clubs later (what’s the record?) I continue to enjoy swimming both for social and competitive pursuits.   I have also been competing in triathlons for the past two years ago and have completed distances ranging from Olympic to Ironman (Twice!).  In 2010, Pascal was the 1^st male in the 30-34 age group out of the water at Ironman Canada.

I have been coached by some high profile coaches including Tom Johnson and Graham Smith and am a strong believer in establishing good technique and working with each swimmer individually to develop the style of stroke that they are best suited to.

I look forward to helping our OMSC members achieve their goals in their upcoming year.

Nelson Chapman

I began coaching Y Masters at the Kelowna Family YMCA about 2 and a half years ago. Without having a competitive swimming background, my coaching philosophy was mainly influenced by my lifeguarding and swimming-lesson-teaching experience and, funny enough, my essay writing skills from university. I like to think of each workout as a well structured essay. I start with a ‘thesis’ and work from there to unpack that focus throughout the workout. Each part in the workout should serve to introduce, explain, support, or reinforce the main purpose/focus of the workout. While I was taught swimming lessons, when possible I preferred to use the discovery-method of teaching (i.e., provide a foundation and guided questions to allow the swimmers to explore from the ground up what/how to do what the skill is). This influences my coaching in that I like to break specific swimming skills down and allow swimmers to experience working through each ‘building-block’ of the overall skill or technical element as opposed to a “describe, demonstrate, do” approach. (Although there are times for that too.)

When I’m not coaching, I am working to pass the time (and feed/shelter myself) until I write the LSAT in December, in preparation for law-school in September 2011 (hopefully). In June 2010 I graduated from UBC-O with a B.A. majoring in Psychology. When I’m not working I like to play volleyball, watch movies and read, bike and run, and even swim occasionally – although it’s a goal of mine to be doing this more regularly!

View or Download the 2012 Season Swim Plan (PDF)