A team of 26 Williams Lake Blue Fin swimmers travelled down to Kamloops on the Oct. 22 and 23 weekend for their first competition of the season.
“This one day swim meet was the perfect way to kick off the year. Many of our younger swimmers are still new to meets and a few were attending their first out-of-town competition,” said Head Coach Chad Webb.
New to the competitive team this year are Julien Allaire, Jasper Bird, Jolie Lulua, Hazel Pare and Alex Walker. “These newly-competitive swimmers did a great job navigating what can be a pretty chaotic and stressful environment. We were really impressed with not only the way they handled themselves, but how the rest of the team stepped up and showed them the ropes.”
Many of the swimmers raced very tough events and did an outstanding job pushing through.
Rebecca Elefson was named Senior Swimmer of the Meet after crushing an incredibly challenging event schedule, swimming the 800 m freestyle and stepping up a short 20 minutes later for the 1500 m freestyle and setting a new club record with a time of 19 min 44.33 sec.
Gavin Reedman competed in his first 1500 m freestyle, qualifying for divisional championships in this event, while Annica Stalker, Hunter Stokes, Tiera French, Niomi Neufeld and Jasper Bird competed in their first 400 m events.
Jesse Neufeld earned the Junior Swimmer of the Meet, achieving 100 per cent best times and impressing his coaches and teammates with the significant improvements he’s made since last season.
“Jesse has been working very hard at each and every practice, and to see that hard work pay off was really inspiring for the entire team,” said Webb.
This coming weekend, Cale Murdock and Jadyn Johnston will be representing Williams Lake at the FINA Swimming World Cup in Toronto, where they will be racing against the top swimmers in the world, including a number of current world record holders.
Read more: CASUAL COUNTRY 2022: Third generation racer Emily Thomas
Read more: Work underway as Williams Lake Cross-Country Ski Club prepares for season
ruth.lloyd@wltribune.com
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter