The Essex Mini League has now finished for this year. This league is a development gala for our younger swimmers backed up by more experienced swimmers. A standard time is set for every event and it is the coaches who try to select the right swimmer for each event. This may result in a swimmer then swimming their third fastest stroke on the night.
This season many of our younger swimmers have gained valuable experience of league galas which will help them moving forward to events like Junior Arena league. Mistakes have been made and hopefully learnt from.
It is always interesting to visit venues that we don’t normally go to. Last Saturday at Clacton the noise level at times was off the scale and this all added to the excitement of our final round.
Basildon had a really good season this year. Round one, first place, beating hosts Harlow. Round two saw us at Harwich, again first place. Round three, our home gala and again finishing first place. Round four at Runnymede, coming second place by just one point. The final round at Clacton saw us in first position in the league with everything to swim for. The swimmers took this literally and despite our best efforts to select swimmers who had not achieved the “standard times”, we suffered too many time faults. This means no points even though it may appear we won the event. Our swimmers are amazing. We came joint first on the night, tied with Chelmsford SC.
The final league positions saw Harlow as the eventual winners with Basildon and Phoenix runners up. A fantastic result which all the coaches were delighted with.
We would like to take the opportunity to thank all the swimmers who took part in every round, the team managers poolside, our volunteer officials, Lyndsey Motin for organising our home gala, Carla Marshall for sending umpteen messages and Steve Zyss for organising officials. And also a big thank yout to our parents who have given up Saturday evenings to go on quite long journeys at times and given fantastic support to the team.
Finally, Will and myself would like to say a huge thank you for the pleasure you have given us this season, watching swimmers develop and improve, making team selection so difficult.
Bring on 2018.
Sue Humphries
