About Swim Squad
Stories inspired by the world of swimming
About Coach Frank
Swimming has been part of my life since I was a kid. I began swimming at the Westfield YMCA, later trained in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and competed for Cardinal Gibbons High School, qualifying for the state championships all four years.
Years later, I found my way back to the pool when the Greenheads in Brigantine, New Jersey, gave me the opportunity to begin coaching. What started as a return to a sport I had grown up with became an entirely new experience, this time seeing swimming through the eyes of a coach and, more importantly, the children learning and discovering it for themselves.
Working with young swimmers at the Greenheads gave me a different perspective. I began to realize that a child’s first experience with swimming isn’t always about strokes, times, or competition. Sometimes it’s simply about walking into an unfamiliar place, meeting new people, and finding the confidence to give something new a try.
Those experiences became the inspiration for Swim Squad.
As a coach, I’ve watched children arrive excited, nervous, curious, hesitant, and sometimes all four at once. I created Swim Squad to make that unfamiliar world feel a little more familiar before a child ever steps onto the pool deck.
Through Finn, Percy, Coach Terri, and the rest of the Swim Squad, I hope to share the encouragement, friendship, fun, and sense of belonging that can make swimming such a special part of a child’s life.
Every swimmer has a first day. Every first day deserves a story.
The Story Behind Swim Squad
Swim Squad started with something I saw over and over around the pool: for a child, swimming is a whole world of new experiences. There are new faces, new equipment, new words, new routines, and plenty of moments that adults who have been around swimming for years may not even think twice about.
That made me wonder what it would be like to introduce children to that world through stories before they ever had to experience it for themselves.
That idea became Swim Squad.
It begins with Finn and his first experience with a swim team, but I never imagined Swim Squad as just one book or one story. I see it as a world that can grow with its characters and its readers exploring new experiences around the pool, introducing new challenges, celebrating milestones, and showing all the little moments that make swimming special.
And I hope that world eventually reaches beyond the books, giving kids even more ways to connect with the characters and feel like they're part of the Squad themselves.
The Heart Behind Swim Squad
Making the unfamiliar familiar.
For adults, walking onto a pool deck might not seem like a big deal. For a child doing it for the first time, it can feel enormous.
What are all those things beside the pool? Where am I supposed to go? What if everyone else already knows what they're doing? What if I'm nervous?
Those feelings are at the heart of Swim Squad.
I don't want these stories to tell children that they shouldn't be nervous. I want them to show that it's okay to be nervous, curious, excited, unsure, or all of those things at once. Sometimes confidence doesn't come before we try something new. Sometimes it comes because we tried.
Through friendship, encouragement, humor, and familiar experiences, I want Swim Squad to give parents another way to help their children approach something new with a little more understanding and a little less uncertainty.
Because sometimes the first step toward feeling like you belong is simply knowing what to expect.