USC - EP SHORT COURSE
USC’s first short course gala of the season, the inaugural Eastern Province SC Championships, which meant that any event won by our swimmers became a new Gala record, this really motivated and inspired the swimmers to dig deep.
USC represented by a large team (24) at the championship faired extremely well in both the Junior (u14) and Open (15&O) events.
There were some really stand-out performances from everybody in the team, it was led by the Seniors who really stood up this gala, James Crowder started with a dominating performance in the 200im blitzing the field in the last 50, Luke Coetzer and Blaine Kruger battled it out for honours in the 50bk but it was Luke who had the better touch and won in a time of 28sec. James and Luke both left the gala with 3 & 2 meet records respectively, well-done guys!!
Alex Goddard got the juniors going with a stunning 100 bf and finishing 3rd, these performances seemed to spearhead the rest of the team to pull out some stunning personal best times, which was pleasing to see so early on in the season.there where a bag of 4th places 2 from Paige Riddin, 2 by Jordan Ramoo and 1 by Aaron Hayword.
The Highlight of the gala was the USC supporters, who looked so smart in their new golf shirts, sitting together on the grand stand or on pool deck as an official, it seemed to be a sea of USC everywhere.
The short course really highlighted some of our team’s mistakes and showed us how important it is to concentrate on our skills at training, especially when you going at full speed the wall seems to come at you a bit sooner than you anticipated or how important getting off the blocks first is, so you not playing catch up or eating somebody else’s wake. At least we now have time before summer comes around to work on these things and try and limit our mistakes before the long course season.
The gala was finished off by some really fun mix team relays, where the boys and girls got to race with and for each other, a great initiative by EPA.
A big THANK YOU to all the parents who travelled up to support and who helped officiate, without you guy’s the gala would not have been such a huge success.
GO TIGERS!!
(To see full results, please check results page on website)