The last weekend of November saw Age Group Performance travel over the Pennines for the long course City Of Sheffield Snow Frills Meet.
Session one started slowly as swimmers found their way into the meet and took time to adjust. Evie started the ball rolling with gold in the 200 free in a time of 2.11.98. This seemed to relax the BEST swimmers as the performances improved with James Vaughan and Alfie Owen collecting gold and silver in the 100 breaststroke, quickly followed by Alice Holt picking up a silver in the same event. Evie then added to her gold tally winning the 200 fly with Lucy Vaughan finishing third.
Saturday afternoon brought more success as Jorja Howard and James got bronze in the 100 fly, Evie then got her hat trick by winning the 200 IM. The speedsters got in on the act with Anya Foxwell and Avagrace Hodson collecting gold and silver in the 50 free
before Jorja and Hannah Lee both won the 50 back.
Sunday morning saw an AGP gold rush as seven gold medals went into the pot in what was an outstanding session for the group. Jorja, Evie and Alfie all won their respective 200 backstroke events with Hannah just being pipped into second place. Thirteen-year-old Alice won the 200 breaststroke in a time that would have won the whole event. The 100 free also proved profitable as Anya and Evie won gold with Jorja and Avagrace coming second and third.
The last session started a little wearily as the morning session had ran late, the group dug in however and responded with Evie and Jorja both winning the 100 back with Hannah again just being pipped into silver. Alfie won another silver in the 200 IM before Lilli Tipping in her best competition of the season came second in the 50 breast with Evie a whisker behind in third. Not to be outdone Jorja finished her weekend with silver in the 50 fly and Phoebe Grogan joining in with bronze in the same event.
All in all, a great weekend of racing for AGP with lots of medals, masses of PBs, lots of smiles and as always lessons to be learned to take back to the training pool. As a coach it was good to see the group have time and again the best underwaters in their heats, swimmers digging in when it got hard and coming out with big smiles but also reacting maturely when things didn’t go as they wanted.
Thanks again to Mel, Jo and Lee for their help on poolside it is very much appreciated .
Dave
