Over 50 years ago AMAC was established by passionate Medicine Hat families and their love of swimming. In those days, swimmers travelled by bus to practices in the city of Ralston which contained our area’s closest indoor pool. Today the club has grown to become the largest year round swim program in the Medicine Hat area encompassing swimmers from learn-to-swim to master swimmers in their 70’s and we practice at the most advanced training facility in southeast Alberta.
A hallmark of AMAC is the strong teaching of the fundamentals of swimming while attempting to keep it fun and creating an environment where every athlete is part the team. Many former swimmers continue the sport as adults for fitness or health and have come through our program. A majority of swimmers participating in our national group have gone on and swam at the University level. A majority of those received athletic scholarships or were aided by their swimming career in consideration for admission. This national program is unique in our city and only AMAC offers this training program for its older and more advanced swimmers. This is made possible by the close proximately to CHHS which aids in the early morning and early afternoon practices for these student atheletes. The current landscape to be competitive with clubs in larger city centre's such as Edmonton, Calgary, and across the country requires our swimmers to compete against programs who spend 30%-40% more training time in the pool then our athletes. The club has found a happy compromise by using specialized advanced instruction and a swim centric dryland program to offset those advantages. We feel that less time in the pool with more quality time spent in instruction is what has given the club its unique ability to compete with larger clubs. In recent years, the AMAC coaching experience has evolved into custom and long term specialized plans for each swimmer.
While AMAC has had success and continues to have success at the advanced levels, the club is a great starting point for any swimmer at any level and offers a program for any age or experience. The club continues to strive to keep costs lower for all swimmers in Medicine Hat by hosting and operating numerous invitational and provincial swim meets to help reduce the cost to all Medicine Hat swimming parents who might otherwise incur larger travel expenses if these local meets were not offerred. In addition to operating 4-5 swim meets each year, we help the city hosts summer games by managing the swim portion of those games at the BMGC.
The club trains and operates out of the Big Marble Go Centre (BMGC). This facility boasts a super fast, 8 lane, 50 metre competition pool with weight room facilities.
