Joel Knight

Joel joins us after 15 years of swimming experience, with the last two years working exclusively with 9-12 year olds across two different clubs in the South East. This experience has allowed him to refine his practice and be in the best position to really influence the prep side of swimming here at Mount Kelly. Joel’s key values in his coaching stem back to values that he holds from his time swimming, where discipline and work ethic were fundamental.

Joel believes in the perfect formula of careful attention to a technical base and then building the content on top – finding the place for hard work in with the constant attention to detail.

He spent his entire secondary education at Millfield School, and has grown up in the boarding environment and learnt to balance education with an intense activity programme across several sports. The experience Joel gained at Millfield allowed him to understand the importance of lifestyle balance and dealing with performance lifestyle, with breaking his first British record during the build up to his GCSEs, and his second just weeks after, where he won the 1500m freestyle at the European Youth Olympic Festival. Joel is keen to become a positive mentor for the swimmers at Mount Kelly and be able to share his recent experiences of racing at that level and share the life lessons learnt by going through the process.

Since beginning his coaching career, he was the top age group coach at the Hampshire counties in his first year, with the top 11 year old boy. He was also a member of the Hampshire Talent camp 2017 and then on the Berks and South Bucks Talent Programme 2018. He has worked with the best swimmers and coaches across both these counties during the process to stimulate his development further.

Joel had a fantastic Junior swimming career whilst being coached by our very own Emma Collings-Barnes. Joel excelled in the 800m and 1500m freestyle, medalling at Nationals every year between the ages of 11 and 19. At the age of 14, Joel won his first National titles, claiming Gold in the 800m freestyle, open water and in 3 relay teams. Joel also currently holds the 1500m freestyle British age group record (15 Years).

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