Under the care of Luke and Wendy they impressed on all levels taking home 8 gold, 16 silver and 15 bronze medals. This was an away meet for Team Steel with a two night stay in Blackpool and is a great learning curve for all the swimmers. These meets really allow you to bond as a team and help to develop your race preparation.
Both Luke and Wendy were extremely pleased with the performances of JO2. In between the swimming the meet would have rock music playing and gave out Blackpool rock candy. This great atmosphere surely inspired swimmers such as George Tartakovski who took home 7 medals in total and the 2nd rank in the 9 years boys overall category. It looks like Team Steel has another superb fly swimmer in the making taking the gold in the 50 and 100 was Vincent Narvarro.
At this stage in the swimming, the swimmers are still learning how best to approach a race and what the best tactic is for them. The only way you can find this out is to try it in a race, but you have to commit to it even if it is really hard. Two swimmers who did just that were Chloe Cooke and Katrina Tutoveanu. Chloe front ended all her races, so sprinted the first half as fast as she could and then had to show her resolve in the second part of the race. Katriana approach was different negative splitting her races, so the second half was faster than the first, this requires a lot of skill to pull it off and judging by her 200 Freestyle performance Katriana aced it.
A main trait of our elite Team Steel swimmers is that they are tough and persevere in any situation. Emily Lambert embodied this trait over the meet. Despite not feeling 100% she would not give in and manged to get herself some NER times.
As the end of season is fast approaching JO2 will be hard at work practising their skills ready to finish the season on a high at our very own Summer Meet.