A swimming club in the Wirral has received essential funding from the Swimathon Foundation.

Bebington Swimming Club applied for the grant as part of Swimathon Foundation’s Covid-19 Relief Fund, announced last month, to mitigate the losses of their summer championships, due to take place on 6 June, and help train up two young volunteers as Assistant Coaches.

The Liverpool-based club are entirely run by volunteers with swimmers aged 6 to 70 years old and run an active training and competition programme open to all.

Beverley Raistrick from Bebbington Swimming Club spoke about how the funding was key to investing in their young members,

“We are delighted to receive the funding, we bid for it for two specific reasons. We have a long-proven track record to develop our young people into aquatic coaching and lifeguarding so we specifically wanted to use the funding to put two of our young people through their coaching level course. From our last cohort there were six of them who went on to paid employment as lifeguards and most of them volunteer as coaches for us as well. It’s important to develop those young people to ensure that the future of the club is looked after.

“We also rely on a number of home galas to help fund and support our coaches when they travel away to galas because we are an entirely volunteer organisation. But if you are going to be travelling to other galas, we feel like we should be funding the costs of that.

“The main thing we all just want to know now when we can get back into the pool, because all the members are excited to get back however that may be.”