North Sydney had another successful outing to the annual NSW Relay State Championships on Sunday. As the second largest team, with 30 swimmers, we maximised our individual swims and entered 37 relays to help get us to a 2nd place team finish. Every swimmer and swim counted on the day. Our motto was: Speed doesn’t matter; just finish the race, don’t get disqualified and HAVE FUN!!!  And we certainly accomplished the mission.

A few thank-you’s and notes of interest:

  1. To every swimmer who participated.... for showing up, not getting disqualified, finishing every race, and having funJ. Every single one of you counts on the day – you have to be in it to win it.
  2. To our newcomers and/or first time carnival entrants: Stuart McMartin, Jade Lish, Rhys Hill, Meeky Lee and Richard Burk – we hope you had fun and got a taste for the relay carnival to inspire you to return next year and maybe even participate in some other carnivals between now and then.
  3. To a couple of returning members who we were excited to have back for the relay carnival: Damian Asprey and Melody Xu.
  4. To our social and competition only members: Simone Salier and Jonathon Roberts – keep up your training, we love having you with us on competition day!
  5. And to our butterflyers Alvin and Melody who took the hit for the team and swam 3 or 4 out of 5 relays on the butterfly leg including 100 fly each. Well done!!
  6. From the coach in me: Thank you for abiding by all the many rules and avoiding disqualification – I hope all the starts and turns practice in the past month have helped you learn the rules and made you all more confident on the day.

According to past member and our biggest facebook fan Don Spender, we also broke 3 club records. The full results will be posted on the NSW Masters swimming site in the next few days and our club results will be imported to the club website when they are available as well.

The carnival calendar in NSW is quite empty now until September. Email reminders will be sent leading up to several local short course meets hosted by Pirates, Ryde, and Warringah all before Short Course State Championships in October in Canberra, so stay tuned for more information in August.  (If you want to compete sooner and tour other parts of Australia, check out the Australia Masters website for other interstate carnivals – you will likely need to go to the state of your choice and select ‘Events’ to find the schedule in a particular state).

Your Pool Captain in swimming & Social Times,

Christina