The club has received confirmation from Tooting Leisure Centre that we can return to swimming on Friday, 4th December and get in a couple of swims before Christmas. The session times will be as before at the moment, so please attend at the time you were swimming prior to the recent lockdown, ie the 20:00 or 20:50 session.

As not everyone celebrates Christmas, the leisure centre will be closed on Christmas Day (Friday, 25th December 2020) and New Years Day (Friday, 1st January 2021), so there will be no swimming sessions on these days.

If anyone still has not returned in the health check survey and returning to training declaration, please ensure you download, print and complete them, and bring them with you to the next session. Entry and exit to the leisure centre will be as before. Please remember that both parents and swimmers will need to wear a face covering upon entering the leisure centre, and if you are sitting in the gallery, where social distancing must be maintained, your face covering must remain on, covering both mouth and nose. Also, as before, do not bring anyone with you “to watch”, as it is still a requirement that only one person accompanies the swimmers (if necessary).

Kind regards and looking forward to seeing you all next week.

Swim England is asking members to sign an open letter to Prime Minister Johnson, asking the government to reconsider the closure of leisure centres and allowing swimming to continue over the next month. The organisation is also asking that members use social media and contact their MPs in order to promote this cause.

You can find more information about this campaign here:

How you can help support Swim England’s #OpenOurPools campaign

The letter will be sent to the Prime Minister at 17:00 on Tuesday 3rd November 2020, so make sure to sign it before then.

The club has heard from Tooting Leisure Centre, and as was expected due to the current lockdown from Thursday, they will be closing on Wednesday evening. Therefore, there will be no Friday swimming sessions until further notice.

If you are currently attending the sessions, we will write to let you all know when we can get back and if you will be able to re-attend your current sessions (assuming the times are not changing again). Stay safe and let’s hope it is not too long before we are back again!

Our Friday sessions continue as usual over half term – swimming on Friday 23rd and Friday 30th October 2020.

BJSC’s swimming sessions will continue on Friday evenings, although London has moved into tier 2 of the Covid-19 restrictions. This change in status doess not have an effect on Tooting Leisure Centre’s ability to host our swimming sessions.

Tooting Leisure Centre has posted a video showing the process for accessing the pool. Although this is aimed at those taking swimming lessons, the process for getting to poolside is exactly the same for BJSC club members: wait at the “swimming lessons” sign, and we will collect you.

See the video here: https://en-gb.facebook.com/tootingleisurecentre/videos/264054317901748/

The club has published a number of documents related to resuming training sessions. Of utmost importance in these documents, for swimmers, are the ‘Health check protocol’, ‘Health screening survey’ and the ‘Return to swimming declaration’ – the latter two documents must be completed and brought with you to your first training session. If you do not bring these completed documents with you, you will not be allowed to swim.

To view the complete list of documents visit the Covid-19 documents and policies page.

As you may have heard, Battersea Jacs is returning to swimming soon. However, the pool time we have been offered is a reduction of approximately 70% on our previous sessions, and we will have no access to the teaching pool. Consequently we cannot return to the programme we had in place prior to March 2020. We are currently not able to run sessions in the Teaching Pool.

Unfortunately, this means that we are in the position whereby we have to ration the available pool time. This is both because the pool operator has reduced the number of swimmers we are allowed to have in the pool at any time, and because we want to make sure that it is
safe for our members to return to swimming.

In the first instance we will be inviting 18 members to join our initial session. Please don’t worry if you are not invited in the first batch, this does not mean that you will not receive an invitation in the future. We are trying to expand the sessions we have been offered, and, as we learn the new processes required under the current, restrictive regime, we will try to increase the number of swimmers we can accommodate in the sessions that we have.

The basis for our first selection is swimmers who can swim continuously for an hour, are regular attenders and have represented the club in galas, since this aligns with the requirements of the operator, the pool time we have been allocated and Swim England guidance on reducing risk. Although it may take a few months to work out, we are committed to providing pool time for all swimmers who can take part in sessions in the main pool at Tooting, but this may be for shorter sessions.

Please visit our web site, which has more information about our safety protocols and guidance for swimmers (www.bjsc.org.uk).

We will contact you in the next few weeks about resuming subscriptions.

We will notify you of any updates as soon as we are able. Thank you for your patience and support at this difficult time.

Kind regards.

BJSC Committee

While Tooting Leisure Centre will be re-opening from Wednesday (19 August), the pool will remain closed due to scheduled maintenance. However, Places Leisure has tentatively proposed that the pool will be available from the week commencing 7 September.

As soon as we are able to confirm dates, we will contact members to advise when sessions will be running. We expect to be running a reduced number of shorter sessions for the foreseeable future.

Tooting Bec Lido is to re-open from 12 August, for lane swimming only, and Wandsworth’s leisure centres are to open from 19 August.

While pools at Putney, Balham and Latchmere will also re-open for lane swimming from 19 August, the pool at Tooting Leisure Centre will remain closed for scheduled maintenance. There is no date currently available for Tooting’s pool to re-open.

Unfortunately that means that the club is still unable to set a schedule for swimming to recommence.