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The Swim School Story
The swim school was started by Dean Greenwood in 1995 at Mt Eden Swimming Pool. While setting up the swim school Dean was still producing top competitive swimmers who were representing NZ. By this time the workload of managing a swim school and a competitive program was becoming challenging, and led Dean to a move away from competitive coaching. The swim school had developed a program that catered to swimmers from a variety of different ages and abilities, including Babies, Preschool, School-age, Adults & Competitive Squads.The swim school began expanding with new sites at Kelston (2004), New Windsor (2006), Massey (2013) and more recently Northcote and Sunnynook (2019). During this time the Swim School went through a huge period of growth of both customers and staff so in 2019 we began a positive restructure of the company to provide more pathways, opportunities and training for staff and ensure we continued to provide exceptional service.
As a part of providing “exceptional customer experiences” for clients we also introduced a perpetual program (all year round swimming) which meant more consistency and better progression for students. At the same time we launched a new booking system making it easier, more convenient and more transparent for our customers and allowed us to focus our efforts on building relationships with our clients onsite.
We are still completing our evolving restructure process and have already managed to create Area Manager roles which oversee Northern, Western and Central sites, as well as ensure that each facility has a dedicated On Site Manager plus Shift Managers and Senior Instructors to help support the site and all other staff. As part of the restructure we created a specific Head Office role located at Mt Eden Pool to help centralise some of our processes and support sites to be more productive.
One of our aims was to ensure that as we grow as an organisation we have the right structure in place to provide a high level of service so we expanded our portfolio areas so our Executive Team could focus more of their time on Human Resources, Instructor & Lifeguard Training, Marketing, I.T. and Health & Safety.
We pride ourselves on delivering a high standard of training and development to our staff to ensure consistency and excellence while also providing fun environments that maximise learning in an enjoyable environment! Our in-house programme has now been accredited to provide a nationally recognised qualification – one of only a few providers with the capability to do this.
We have learnt a great deal over the last 26years and are excited about the opportunities and direction Dean Greenwood Swim School is heading are looking forward to continually improving our services into the future and being one of the aquatic industry leaders.
About Dean Greenwood
Dean Greenwood started swimming himself at the age of 5 in a cold outdoor school pool. His father, Ian had been one of the support swimmers for Barry Davenports' famous Cook Strait Crossing so there was a bit of a swimming background in the family. After learning to swim Dean got involved in competitive swimming and SurfLifeSaving in Wellington. He then travelled to Dunedin to swim with Duncan Laing where he won national swimming and surf lifesaving titles and represented NZ in swimming, surf lifesaving and marathon swimming. After retiring in 1987 he began coaching with Duncan and then with Hilton Brown in 1989.
It was a rather daunting task in the beginning for a young coach as many of the swimmers in that team were former team mates of Dean’s but it worked well and he went on to develop many of New Zealand's top swimmers in the 90’s with athletes Trent Bray and Mark Weldon competing at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. Along the way other swimmers on the team excelled at national level Winning many New Zealand Titles and setting National Records. The team also included Aaron Bidois who medalled at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta.
In 1995 the opportunity to start his own swim school came up and Dean moved to the Mt Eden Pool just off Dominion Road. . The role of Head Coach was left in the capable hands was passed on to new coaches which has since produced top swimmers for the Laser Mt Eden Club. Dean now focuses on the company as the Director but can still be found coaching our adult fitness squad at Kelston pool in the mornings!
