Living on an 180 000 acre property 110 kilometres north-west of Bourke in 2005 understandably reduced Michelle Mort’s options for accessing swimming lessons for her two young sons.

Yet when Mort and her husband sold up and moved into Bourke in 2006, her options failed to improve.

The gap in services prompted Mort to start her own swim school and with little in the way of training, experience or resources, Mort relied on her own ‘get up and go’ attitude and help from the Sport Leadership Grants and Scholarships for Women program — a joint initiative between the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) and the Australian Government Office for Women. The grants and scholarships are offered to inspire and help women in the sports industry reach their leadership potential through education and development opportunities.

‘I started with an AUSTSWIM Learn to Swim class which the ASC gave me a grant to attend, and while that was good, it didn’t really show me how to teach from really young kids right up to older people,’ Mort said.

She went on to gain her Infants Aquatics, Teaching Adults, Competitive Strokes, Green Licence swim coach accreditation and Bronze License Coaching Qualification, all with the ASC’s support, and in spite of the barriers presented by finding childcare for her sons and travelling as far away as the Gold Coast to train.

Now, Mort has gained further ASC support through the 2009–2010 Sport Leadership Grants and Scholarships for Women to complete a certificate course in training and assessment that will allow her to train swim coaches and timekeepers at the Bourke Amateur Swimming Club.

‘There is no one person around to train these people and getting anyone in to do that sort of training means we’ve got to get people from Sydney, over 900 kilometres away,’ Mort said.

‘The way I see it, the more accredited people we have around, the more everyone understands what they need to do, the better our club runs and the better off everyone will be.’

The 40-year-old remembers the enjoyment she had from recreational swimming in her youth, and wanted the same opportunities for her children, Barney and Charlie.

‘At the age of four, my kids had never been to a swimming pool,’ she said. ‘When we moved into town [Bourke] I thought, great, we’ll get them to lessons, but there was nothing around’.

She started a swim school in 2006 with 40 children. Now she has more than 100.

Ironically, she hasn’t formally taught either of her own children to swim. ‘They basically didn’t want to learn from Mum,’ she laughed. ‘But because they’ve spent so much time at the pool with me, they seem to have adapted well. My 7-year-old is actually swimming quite well.’

Mort said she gains great satisfaction from seeing ‘a huge pile of five and six-year-olds who are capable swimmers and a large number of younger children who are confident enough to get themselves out of the water if they fell into a pool’ as well as older children stepping up to squad training.

‘This is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done,’ she said. ‘Seeing a little kid who’s scared of the water at the beginning of the season then swimming 10 or 25 metres is just amazing.’
Mort’s is one of 132 educational opportunities across the country to be supported in 2009 by the Sports Leadership Grants and Scholarships for Women.