What Practice Looks Like When You’re Not the One Keeping Time ...Middle East

By SwimSwam Partner Content on SwimSwam

Courtesy of Neon Innovation, a SwimSwam partner.

Think about the parts of practice that have nothing to do with coaching.

You call out a send-off. Ten seconds later you call it again for the next lane. A swimmer surfaces and asks what rep they’re on. Two kids leave early because they lost the interval. You are tracking three send-offs in your head while doing the math for a fourth. The set you spent twenty minutes designing has turned into you, standing at the wall, running a stopwatch and repeating yourself.

Most coaches have just accepted this. It is how practice has always run: one clock on the wall, and a coach who becomes air-traffic control the moment warm-up ends. The problem is not your workout. It is that the workout lives in your head and on the whiteboard, and the only way to run it is to narrate it, rep by rep, for two hours.

It does not have to.

There is a kind of clock you may have never used

A programmable pace clock is a category a lot of coaches have never touched. If your idea of a pace clock is one that counts to 59:59 and rolls over, this is a different thing. You program the set into Neon Pace Clock once. It counts the reps. It shows the interval. It sounds the send-off. Swimmers read it and go, without looking at you. Think of it as an assistant coach who never gets tired: it runs the timing so you do not have to.

That one change, moving the set out of your head and onto a clock the whole pool can read, is what separates the practices that drag from the ones that fly.

What it looks like in the water

Warm-up ends and nobody waits for instructions. Sprinters slide into fast 50s on one interval, distance swimmers lock into 400s on another, your IM group works through stroke transitions on a third, all on the same clock, each reading its own send-off. No clusters at the wall. No “what number are we on?” You pull two athletes aside to fix a catch while the rest of the group keeps running the set exactly as you wrote it. You glance up and know where every lane is. By the last rep, the practice you designed is the practice that happened.

You did not coach less. You spent the whole two hours coaching instead of counting.

Several groups, several send-offs, one pool. Every swimmer reads their interval off the Neon Pace Clock and leaves on time.

How it actually works

Under the hood it is simple, and you do not need to be a tech person to run it:

Build the set once in the free Neon Swim app and the Neon Pace Clock runs it: rep counts, intervals, and send-offs, controlled as simply as a music player.

And if that already sounds like a lot, here is the part that matters most for a first clock: You do not have to use any of it on day one. Plug Neon Pace Clock in and it counts up exactly like the clock on your wall right now: bright ten-inch digits a swimmer can read from the far wall, five pounds, carried in one hand. The app and the programming are there when you want them, not before. It works like the clock you know, only better.

Take one set you already dread running by hand

3 rounds, 3 groups, one pool, all going at once:

3x

On a wall clock, that set is you reading three interval columns off a whiteboard and calling go-times for twenty minutes straight, while somebody still leaves on the wrong second. On Neon Pace Clock, you load it once and walk the deck. Each group reads its own number and its own send-off. Your job for those twenty minutes becomes the thing you came to do: watch swimmers and fix what you see.

That is the difference. Not a fancier clock, but a practice where the timing runs itself.

Built by a coach who got tired of running practice this way

Neon was built by Coach Nick, who has coached in USA Swimming since 2018 and was recently recognized as an ASCA Top 25 age group coach for large teams. He has run groups of more than 40 swimmers across 8 lanes, every ability level in the water at once. Anyone who has coached a group like that knows the problem it creates: one set, one clock, and a coach who spends the whole practice directing traffic. Nick believed there was a better way, and he had the background to build it. He went straight into coaching with a degree in electrical and computer engineering, and built Neon Pace Clock alongside his work on deck.

Whether your group is forty swimmers or four, you want them to be the best they can be: to qualify for the championship meet, to make finals, to win the event, to get into their dream school, whatever the goal is at your level. Getting there means out-working and out-thinking the competition, and a coach stuck calling send-offs all practice is doing neither.

Neon is shaped by coaches. It started with a handful of beta testers and now runs on feedback from coaches across the country who use Neon Pace Clock every day and tell Nick what they love and what could be better. Every round of that feedback goes back into making it more powerful for real workouts.

One honest thing

There are cheaper clocks. You can find a generic programmable-looking clock on Amazon for a couple hundred dollars. Neon Pace Clock is bigger, brighter, more reliable, programmable in the ways a swim set actually needs, and built specifically for swimming instead of borrowed from another sport. The question is not whether it is the cheapest clock on deck. It is whether a clock that does exactly what it promises, every practice, is worth it. Most coaches who try it decide that it is.

From coaches on the deck

“The Neon Pace Clock is an absolute game changer for swim training. If you’re serious about swimming, you need this in your toolbox!”

Jeff Bowlus, Bluffton University

“It’s got a clear display, readable from any distance, super durable, easy to store, and programming ahead of time or on the fly is a piece of cake.”

Joe Novak, St. Pete Aquatics

“The kids don’t have to worry about the intervals at all. They can just work on the focus that we have for that set.”

Matt Mast, Westridge Waves

Try it at practice

If you have never run a practice this way, you do not have to spend anything to find out what it is like. Download the free Neon Swim app, build one set, and run it as a virtual pace clock on a phone, tablet, or screen at your next practice. If it changes how that practice feels, the Neon Pace Clock hardware is there when you want the brightness and the across-the-pool readability, with a 30-day return for any reason and a trade-in if you have an old clock to swap.

Run one set. See whether you ever want to go back to keeping time yourself.

Run one set at your next practice. Swimmers read the Neon Pace Clock and go, no app required to start.

Download the free Neon Swim app: www.neoninnovation.com/store/p/neon-swim

See how it works: www.neoninnovation.com/pace-clock

Learn more or buy the Neon Pace Clock: www.neoninnovation.com/store/p/neon-pace-clock

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