Southampton start well at first weekend of South-East Regional Championships

Southampton swimmers travelled to Crawley for the first weekend of the South-East Regional Championships, producing a number of strong swims.

Dave Has His Say ‘Head Coach Comments’

The South East Swimming Region comprises of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, East Sussex, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Surrey and West Sussex, together with the Crown Dependencies of the Channel Islands. The level of competition is understandably higher than that of Hampshire County level, and just below the National Championships. Swimmers competing at this level need to train between 7-9 sessions per week for approximately 48 weeks of the year consistently. All the CSSC swimmers that competed at these SE Regions train in the Junior National/Regional Squad, of which the base standard is Qualification at SE Region-level. However, the key objective for swimmers in this squad is Top 10 at SE Region-level and National Championships Qualification.

Bas Burnel swam an excellent 200m Breaststroke winning Gold and swimming inside the 13yrs National Age Group time by over 5 seconds, in fact his swim was 2 seconds inside the 14yrs NQT. Personally I believe Bas deserves every bit of this success, his dedication to swimming is second to none here at CSSC. Whilst the majority of Southampton Swimmers who live in Southampton exit early morning training at 7:00am, Bas travels from Lyndhurst to training, he always completes the whole session, 9 sessions a week. On exiting the pool in the morning at 7:30am, his Dad drives him back to Lyndhurst to the school bus stop, where he waits to catch the bus to school. Bas listens and adheres to  pre-race/post-race protocols, clearly he believes in the ‘Programme’ and on Saturday he again listened and adhered to pre-race instructions – and guess what? Shock, horror - It worked! Well done Bas.

The Girls 4 x 100m Free Team of Katie Fryer, India Bosley, Brooke Rumsey and Hannah Stevens achieved an excellent Silver medal, every swimmer racing to their potential, pushing each leg to the max and pushing Guildford all the way. Each girl recording excellent split times. Last year 4:13.73 made the Final at Nationals, girls you went 4:14.15 on Saturday……now do you believe me when I say ‘We could do well here Girls a bit of extra attention to detail and really hard work -you never know!’

Full results are available from the Swim South-East website.

Whilst some City of Southampton swimmers swam very well this weekend, others did not. Too many swimmers wasted opportunties to swim fast. These swimmers must learn to be more candid and accept they were far too complacent.  Some swimmers did not swim to anywhere near their full potential and yes I felt let themselves down, badly, at what is a high level meet. No less than 5 swimmers were late for sessions, arriving far too late on pool deck to even contemplate a decent warm-up, breaking Squad Code of Conducts. However these ill judged actions did have a direct correlation to performances and these questionable performances could have been so easily avoided. I assure you, swimmers do not need to continually learn through mistakes, we just do not have the time to continually learn the same lessons over and over again.

FACT - That extra 10-15mins in bed WILL NOT aid performance, Good pre-Race protocols DOES.

Consistency is the Hallmark of Success.

David Terry
Head Coach