The Club Trial: What Two Weeks of Athlete Academy Dryland Looks Like

The club trial is a free two-week run of Athlete Academy dryland for one group inside your program — your 11–14 age-groupers. You pick the group. For two weeks, those swimmers get individual dryland training through the Athlete Academy app, their movement is checked on film, and every session's load is logged. This is the program's trial: for two weeks, your club has a real land arm, and at the end you see exactly what it found.

I'm Aaron Larmore. I've coached for 20+ years and helped place 150+ athletes into college programs, more than 100 at the Division I level. Athlete Academy is the physical side of that work, delivered online.

Why the 11–14 age-groupers

Almost none of the swimmers in this window are in structured dryland work yet. And these are precisely the ages where coordination, strength, and power are most trainable. Your program builds their swimming. Nobody is building the strength underneath their starts, their turns, and their shoulders. That is the gap the trial makes visible.

What your swimmers actually do

Each swimmer trains on dryland strength, start and turn power, and shoulder resilience — through a program delivered in the app, built around the practice schedule they already have. Day to day, it looks like this:

• Train from the app. Short land sessions, written for this age group, done at home or on deck before or after practice.
• Submit movement on film. Swimmers record key movements; I review the mechanics and send corrections.
• Log every session. Load is recorded on every workout, so nothing rides on "just do it."

Two weeks of that is enough to see who engages and what their movement says.

What you receive at the end

A readout, delivered to you. Concretely: who engaged and how consistently, and what we found across the group — power, left-right asymmetry, shoulder-relevant movement quality, and where each swimmer's gaps sit. You see which swimmers are already moving well on land, which are compensating, and where the group's weaknesses cluster. It is the kind of picture a head coach rarely gets to see, because nobody is usually measuring it.

What it costs the program

Nothing. And the catch is not hidden in logistics: no staff time — we handle onboarding end to end. No equipment to buy. No schedule changes — nothing comes off your water time. Your coaches run the program exactly as they do now; the trial happens around it, on land.

Fifteen minutes is all it takes to set up

We take on a few club trials at a time — film review on every swimmer is the constraint. Fifteen minutes is enough to pick the group and set the dates.

Or simply reply to the email that brought you here with the group you'd pick, and I'll map out how the two weeks would run.