18 swimmers attended the Hereford Open hoping to continue their recent excellent form.
The girls were the first off the blocks with the 200 breast stroke where Emily and Georgie Locke and Morgan Creed made great starts to the weekend with Silvers. The weekend also started well for the Boys with Jon Lowther, Henry Bennett, Ben Rawlins and James Webb all recording PB’s in the 50 Fly and Henry and James taking gold. For James in particular this was to start a theme that resulted in him finishing the Saturday with 4 golds and a new 400 freestyle club record.
Beth Cox started her weekend with a first place in the 100 Back and she would continue to dominate the backstroke across the weekend finishing with PB’s and golds in all 3 distances. Aidan was to follow Beth’s example winning his 100 Backstroke which he followed up later in the weekend with a silver in the 200.
Having won his first 2 races Henry didn’t get it all his own way missing medals in the next 2 races before he put together a string of performances that netted 8 medals from the next 9 races. There were 6 PBs and 3 club records (knocking over 2 ½ seconds off the 100 fly and 200 fly off the previous best and taking the 100 free record as he narrowly missed breaking a minute).
Emily followed the silver in the breast with gold in the 100 fly and was to end up the weekend with medals in all 9 of her events and also unbeaten in the 3 fly distances. Katie Pellow joined the meet for session 2 and left having PB’d in all 3 races medalling in 2.
Jon, Henry and Beth all went into day 2 in contention for their age group Top Boy / Girl awards. Jon had medalled in 6 events on day 1 and had another 7 events to go ! If anything his performances got stronger and he medalled in all 7 despite having to swim the first half of the 400 IM twice due to a power cut. Beth medalled in a further 5 events finishing with 9 PB’s and 10 medals in all.
The clubs swimmers have never ducked the hard events and this was definitely the case in the 400IM where Southwold took all medals in the Girls 13 year old 400 IM (Beth, Georgie Locke and Georgie Lloyd) and the 200 Fly where Emily and Thea both medalled. Ben Rawlins swam a PB and club record in the 400 IM and ended up with 4 medals and 5 PB’s.
Southwold celebrated a hat-trick of Top Boy / Girl awards. Congratulations to Beth, Henry and Jon. Jon also scored the highest points of all swimmers across the meet. This wasn’t the only hat-trick worth celebrating as Henry and Jon have both won the Top Boy awards in their ages groups at this meet for the last 3 years.
Many thanks to the Team managers, officials, especially Jason Moore and Helen Rogers who officiated despite not having swimmers competing, and coaches Simon and Jules. Congratulations to all swimmers who competed and supported each other during the weekend.
