Just a week after Lewis Clareburt announced he's shifting north from Wellington, another top Kiwi swimmer is making the move to Auckland due to facility issues.
Newshub can reveal that junior world championship silver medallist Monique Wieruszowski is also heading to the City of Sails, resulting in a plea from the sport's national governing body that the overall standards of pools around the country needs to be addressed.
Wieruszowski concedes she's plunging into the deep end with her decision.
"I really want it, really badly," Wieruszowski told Newshub. "I'll do anything."
The teenager is shifting not only schools, but cities as well to further her dreams.
"It's just better for my future," she admits.
The 16-year-old will move to Auckland not just for greater coaching opportunities, but also due to the lack of quality facilities at home in Taranaki.
"It's quite frustrating. It's quite hard to get to training and train easily.
"There's not that many pools and it's quite hard to find lanes and everything.
"[It's] only [25m pools] and then a 50m outdoor pool."
Wieruszowski's decision comes just a week after two-time Commonwealth Games gold medallist Clareburt announced his plans to relocate north due to similar issues in Wellington.
Clareburt has struggled to get lane space at the Wellington Regional Aquatic Centre which is shared by other sports and the public.
"It's sort of distracting me from what I'm trying to do and I guess the distractions are getting bigger and bigger and I just think there are better opportunities up in Auckland for me at the moment." Clareburt told Newshub.
The 25-year-old will move to Auckland but without his longtime coach Gary Hollywood, who will stay in Wellington.
Swimming NZ Olympic Programme Lead, Gary Francis, concedes that he’s not entirely happy with standard of facilities nationally.
"We would love better facilities," said Francis.
I think when we look at Australia, if we look at almost any other country that's doing well at swimming, they've got superior facilities to us. That’s a big picture issue.
"What I will say though, is we get great support from our facility providers."
That's not to say that Auckland is the only option.
Erika Fairweather's based in Dunedin, where others have also headed to join the programme.
"We have an incredible support system down there, with high performance providers and our squad in itself," said Fairweather.
"We work harmoniously, it all works so well."
Fairweather and Swimming NZ agree a centralised programme, which was scrapped in 2018, isn't the solution.
"We made a conscious decision five and a half years ago that the centralised progamme that we had then wasn’t working," said Francis.
"We weren’t producing the athletes. Athletes didn’t want to come and train with the particular coach. Athletes want to feel safe, be in an environment where they can focus on their swimming. And for many of them, living at home, getting great nutrition from mum and dad, and local support there, they were missing out on.
"By working with athletes, and asking 'where do you want to swim? Who do you want to coach you?' and trying to fit a programme around them, we've seen a lot of success.
"We're building. We're getting better."
However, Francis concedes that ideally, there'd be changes.
"I'm making a bit of a plea here," he said.
"I'd love four or five, four-lane, 50m, temporary pools to be built at different parts around the country. Pretty cheaply, just for training.
"We need to be able to build our swimming, nationally. We need to make sure that swimmers coming through, those who aren't quite at high performance level, are getting what they need to develop."
New Zealand's future swimming success could depend on it.
