We've had DS5 in group swimming lessons since January and have seen so little progress that I finally decided to fork over the extra money to get him private lessons. In our case, the biggest problem is that DS is a very cautious kid who tends to overthink things. When the instructor tells him to jump in the pool, he immediately starts worrying about sinking, getting water up his nose, etc. To combat this, the private instructor is using lots of tricks to distract him/keep his mind off of swimming. She's even resorted to giving him math problems (her idea) to work in his head while he's doing laps across the pool with a noodle!
As far as soccer goes, DS wants to sign up every chance he gets, for the social aspects of it, but he's got absolutely no interest in actually playing the game or scoring goals. On the field, he hangs back from the rest of the team and mainly just pretends to be going after the ball. He's clearly mortified any time it comes near him. I've wondered how much of that is due to perfectionism and fear of failure, which we've had to combat on other fronts.
He has also loved gymnastics classes (and still begs to go) for the social aspects but is generally unwilling to go out of his very narrow physical comfort zone. There again, I could see he was overthinking things that other kids seemed to do without any thought at all.
I'm still hoping that maybe with enough exposure and practice, he will become more confident physically, but he's definitely no natural athlete so far.
