Olympic Gold Medalist Opens Swim School in Loudoun

Olympic gold medalist Tom Dolan opened Carlile Swimming School recently at Dulles 28 Centre just east of Ashburn and the school has invited the community in for an open house Saturday, April 30. Dolan has opened schools in Australia, but the Dulles site marks the first back home in the United States.

At age 20, Dolan won his first Olympic gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympic Games swimming the 400-meter Individual Medley (IM). Four years later, he took home another gold in the 400 world-record time, along with a silver in the 200-meter IM. He held the world record longer than any other swimmer in IM history, eight years.

Following the 2000 Olympics, Dolan retired from the sport and worked at an investment bank in Rosslyn where he received formal training in business operations and management, but his heart took him back to his comfort zone.

“I always knew in the back of my mind that my passion was swimming, pools and being in the water,” Dolan recalled. “I just had to find a way to work that back in.”

After leaving banking, Dolan spent the better part of three years in Australia learning the Carlile Swimming business model. He helped open three schools in Sydney and Melbourne before bringing Carlile Swimming to the USA. While the Northern Virginia area was familiar to Arlington-born Dolan, it wasn’t the primary reason he picked Dulles as the first location for this popular Australian swim school.

“Loudoun County jumped off the demographics map as a phenomenal location with all the young families with multiple kids,” he explained. “This area has one of the most populated summer swimming programs in the United States."

Summer leagues are considered the grassroots of swimming in the United States, Dolan said. An aim for Carlile Swimming is to transition people into viewing year-round swim schools as the grassroots that feed into other programs.

“Swimming is not a three-month-out-of-the-year sport; it is a year-round learning process that kids need to get into at the earliest age possible,” he said. “I want parents to know that it is safe to put kids in the water as young as 3 months old. Most parents are surprised how well children do in the water at that age.”

But Dolan’s drive is not to find the next Olympic gold medalist, actually far from it.

”For me, getting kids from the community involved in swimming is the most important part of the sport,” he said, explaining the safety benefits of learning to swim. “This is the sport I grew up with but this has nothing to do with competition. Drowning is one of the top causes of accidental death in kids under the age of five in the United States.”

By challenging children in a nurturing environment, children can overcome a fear of the water and learn the lifesaving skill of swimming. Carlile’s lessons are based on a structured system that is rarely seen in learn-to-swim programs in the United States. Each class has a specific outline, down to the minute, on what drills children will practice.

“The aim is help swimmers understand how to physically do things properly,” the Olympian said. “Swimming with technical proficiency is something [rarely taught] in the United States. What we do here is very different because it is not about how fast you can get to the wall, it is about doing it with technical precision. A half an hour, stoke correction class brings kids into a quiet environment and allows them to slow down and focus on the mechanics of what is going on.”

The lesson structure is not the only thing that sets the Carlile apart. The pool is adaptable to whatever level is being taught.

“This, most importantly, lets us address the needs of the children, so they feel safe and can learn how to swim in the most efficient amount of time,” Dolan explained.

The three pools in the Dulles 28 location are kept at a cozy 90-degrees Fahrenheit. The pools vary in depth and two of the pools are significantly shorter than the traditional 25-meter length. All pools feature ledges on the far edges that allow children to stand chest deep, no matter their height. This design encourages children to safely discover how their bodies respond to water without someone holding on to them.

“There is a balance in our build that we spent a lot of time researching and measuring,” the swimming medalist said. “We call it a purpose-built pool—every spec of it is built for the comfort of kids with the ultimate goal of teaching kids how to swim.”

Carlile’s on Saturday runs from noon to 4 p.m. Parents and children can take a first-hand look at pools and to ask questions. Dolan will have his Olympic medals on hand and there will be an Olympic medal arts and crafts project for kids.