I’ve often heard swimmers complain, when they have a small pool, that they can’t be competitive. Their pool is too small. If a small pool made a team uncompetitive then Ocean Falls, B.C. should have sucked.

There are examples of clubs excelling despite bad scenarios every now and then. Pools do break down but good clubs survive over the short term. There are examples of amazing individuals who were great successes despite their circumstances. Maybe they were just gifted individuals who would succeed anywhere so a good better example to dispel the myth would be if multiple swimmers, succeeding year after year, despite training in a small pool, were successful. Teams producing swimmers out of a 25m pool is not totally unheard of but what about an even smaller pool? How about a 20yd pool?

An example comes to mind that should dispel the small pool mindset. A very small pool in a very small town; Ocean Falls, BC.

If you haven’t heard of Ocean Falls it is because it was tiny. It had one industry, a huge pulp & paper mill, built beside a dam. The MacMillan Bloedel company built the small town to house its employees and their families and later built the indoor pool. When the paper mill closed the town disappeared. It is a now a ghost town with a handful of people living in the remnants of its former population.

You can not drive to Ocean Falls. It is only accessible by boat or seaplane on the coast of British Columbia north of Vancouver Island. At its peak population it had 3000 people and in 1928 it boasted a three-lane twenty yard pool to provide the families a safe place to learn to swim after a child drowned in the nearby lake. This tiny place with a tiny pool produced world records, Olympic medalists and 33 international swimmers!

From this three lane twenty yard pool came 57 international medals, and to put it in context, in the same time frame, from 1948 to 1974, Canada won 107 medals. More than half of Canadian success came from a pin point on a map that you will struggle to find on google maps.

So if you think you can’t make it into the big leagues, because you have a small pool, consider Ocean Falls. They did it and they did it in a big way including multiple Canadian club High Point awards at the national championships. Ocean Falls beat Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and all the huge cities between! Cities with clubs with brilliant facilities.

Think big. Even if you are small.