THE FOUNDATION FOR THE USSSA INSTRUCTOR CERTIFICATION IS UNDER WAY We are well on our way and excited to launch a new USSSA Instructor Certification in 2022. The concept has been well received, we had nearly 300 certification exam seats sold to early adopters at our National Conference!
BY LISA ZARDA USSSA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
14 | USSWIMSCHOOLS.ORG
I wanted to take a moment to outline the journey we have been on and give you an update on where we are now. We started in early 2021 working with a consultant and a small group of volunteers to help us identify if in fact we should create an instructor certification. We used a series of calls with members to identify that there would be a need for a certification to assist in training new instructors the fundamentals that ALL swim instructors should know, with less of a focus on curriculum and stroke development, as each school has their own curriculum. We also identified that Florida swim instructors must be certified from an approved list of state approved certifications, one of the most popular being WSI. We discovered there was a need and that we already had a lot of the content already created. We embarked to create a fundamental
instructor certification with the longer term goal to get it nationally accredited and get it approved by the state of Florida as a swim instructor certification. From the research done with Pause for Change, we have been working to gather together the materials we already had in order to create an online training program that would prepare new instructors both for the job and for taking the certification exam. We have a large portion of the course material gathered, and have plans to film three of the instructor sessions at the Spring Workshop to edit and include in the fundamental instructor course to help round out some of the content we didn’t have fully developed. The target is to have the course completed by mid to late March. We are currently working with certification consultants and a
