From the pool deck
Meet my swimmers.
I spent part of my childhood in the pool, so when I brought the kids back to my old coach, Uncle Jack, in 2024, I thought I had a fairly good idea of what swimming involved. I had forgotten how different the sport looks when you are the parent packing the bags, remembering the reporting times and trying to film a race without recording twenty seconds of lane rope.
How we got here
A family thing, somehow.
Uncle Jack taught me to swim about thirty years ago. In 2024 I took my two older kids to him because I wanted them to learn their strokes properly; I was not planning to reorganise family life around training sessions and swim meets, but Evan joined a competitive squad in January 2026 and Sarah followed in March.
That photograph was taken outside the OCBC Aquatic Centre at Pesta Sukan, their first major competition together. A race might be over in less than a minute, while the warm-up, marshalling, meals, waiting and getting ready for the next event take most of the day, and I want somewhere to remember those hours as well as the times they eventually produced.
Read how this started ↗The two on the blocks
The swimmers.
Evan and Sarah arrived at competitive swimming by different routes, and I would rather give each of them room to tell a fuller story than squeeze everything into a post that disappears down a feed.
Youth Squad · boys / LCM
Evan Liew
Evan is the one who drew me back into competitive swimming, this time from the spectator stand. What began as proper lessons with my old coach in 2024 has turned into squad training, meet days and a growing list of things to work on after every race.
View profile
Age Group Squad / LCM
Sarah Liew
Sarah is my second competitive swimmer, and she has made the pool her own in a way that is quite different from Evan. She found her people at AquaTech almost immediately, and the friendships have become as much a part of her swimming life as the training.
View profileStill learning the ropes
Maybe the next one.
More individual profiles will join this page once their details are ready to share. Hint hint: Sheryl is next... hopefully.
A record I can keep updating
The numbers, and the rest.
Times & targets
The LCM results are here with the meet that produced each time, and the squad standards sit beside their official PBs so we can see what still needs work without mistaking a practice swim for a sanctioned result.
Meet history
I want to be able to look back at the whole sequence, from their first races to the newer events they have taken on, instead of trying to reconstruct it later from photographs and spreadsheets.
What happened around it
Progress is rarely a tidy line on a chart. There are dives that slowly get better, friendships that make training easier to return to and days when simply showing up is part of the achievement.
These profiles can change with the kids as they train and race. When I have a longer story about a meet, the parenting side of things or a lesson we learned the hard way, that belongs on the blog; this page gives me a place to bring the story and the results back together.