It is with regret that I am starting this report of the first round of the Autumn Leicester League on a negative slant. Being such a small club, we are heavily reliant on swimmers to swim for us in these league galas, and often only have a few in each age group, meaning that we can’t afford to have people missing. The fixtures list goes out to you all at the beginning of the year and is also available on the website, please familiarise yourself with this, and please try and keep yourself free for the gala dates. Last night, for the first round of the league, we had 9 swimmers missing, the really isn’t good enough. Unfortunately some were away with illness and injury which cannot be helped, but with so many others missing as well, and pulling out last minute, it put us in a very tough position for our first round. If you know you are going to be away for a gala, and you think you are likely to be picked,  please let us know as soon as you know so that we can make necessary changes.

That said, those that did swim last night swam out of their skin!  Every single swimmer put in 110% efforf, fought hard and positioned us in a very impressive 3^rd place!!! I have to say, at the beginning of the night I would have been happy with 5^th place, so to get 3^rd with so many missing was a massive achievement. As I said, everyone there swam fantastically but there are a few races/swimmers that stuck out in my mind that I will mention now:

·         The Men’s Open 4×50 FC relay was our first win and really brought up team spirit and slightly relaxed a very stressed Rachel and I! The camaraderie of the open men is fantastic and should really inspire the rest of the club (I’ll even put up with that ridiculous chant that seemed to catch on (thanks Chris!) if it gets a result like that! )

·         Yasmine Wells ended up swimming her 2 least favourite events last night to cope with a very depleted 14u girls team, however not once did she argue about it and just got on and did her best. She is a credit to the team, and made mine and Rachel evening a little less stressful, so well done and thank you Yasmine! That said thank you also to Beth Tomlinson for filling in and swimming her least favourite event to fill the gaps!

·         Making it a family affair, Billy Wells also did a fantastic job last night. Having just moved up to secondary school, he has missed a bit of training recently, however this didn’t phase him as he flew off the block and into a brilliant win (which he made look easy!) in his 25m Fly race! Well done Billy

·         Eleanor Hopewell who also helped bridge the gap of swimmer by swimming up an age group giving her 6 races in total. But she knuckeled down in true Eleanor-style and really did well (and defiantly got a nice reward for one of her wins!!!!)

·         A big thank you for the McGeown girls and Shaun Crook Rumsey for stepping in last minute to fill in the gaps of a depleted team! We would have lost a lot of points without them as we just wouldn’t have been able to enter a team for a number of races and so they were defiantly some of the saviours of the evening!

·         Lastly well done to Rachel Hockedy! It was her first gala, but no one would have known it! Despite being very nervous, and having to do the very first swim of the night, leading off the first relay, she swam fantastically and had a smile on her face for the rest of the night!

·         Thank you also to those swimmers coming back from university especially to swim (Fiona, Grace and Chris). It makes a massive difference to the team, as well as being great characters, they can also still (just about) manage a good 100m sprint so thanks guys!

On the whole I was really impressed with last night’s performances. Starts were fantastic, a lot of you were getting some real advantage from some good underwater work, relay takeovers were tight which can make all the difference and you all really worked those last 5metres, making the most out of every part of your race! Well done to everyone, I really am proud of how you swam as a team, and hopefully with a full squad next round we will be able to build further on last night’s performance!

Below are a list of PB’s. What I have done is first listed the official PB’s as always, however I have also included relay splits that were faster than their PB’s. These are not official as you go from a moving start on a relay (not from the starting beep) and so are likely to be faster, however it is still good to keep a record of them. The amount of PB’s really does show the effort the team put in last night!

Individual

Relay Splits

Well done to all those that did swim! Keep up the good work!!!

Suzi

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