County Swimmers in seventh heaven after impressive team display at the 2014 British Gas National Team County Championships

The Berks and South Bucks County Team came 7th in Division 1 in the annual Sheffield showdown, delivering one of the best performances in the County's history.  All 24 members of the B&SB team swam superbly against the cream of British swimming from each of the 38 counties who competed.

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The Berkshire and South Buckinghamshire County Championships Swimming team, travelling to Sheffield

Well what a weekend! This report covers our journey to an awesome, finally confirmed, 7th place in Division 1.

24 of our best young County swimmers aged 12-17 years participated in the British Gas National Team County Championship at Ponds Forge, Sheffield this weekend. With Ponds Forge split to create two 25metre pools allowing two competitions to run in parallel (Division one and Division Two) just over 1000 swimmers in fancy dress with Coaches, Team Managers, Presidents and Officials from 38 counties including Scottish and Welsh Regions assembled ready to compete in 24 individual 100m sprint and 7 relay events.

This is the third year running that we've chosen to meet at Wycombe Sports Centre at 11:00 on the Saturday before the event and head for the Intensive Training Centre at Loughborough University to train. We're learning each year we do it and the learning seems to be paying off.

After training in the pool adorned with the names of Loughborough's Olympians we met up with a previous Berkshire and South Bucks Captain, Lucy Campbell, who is now training with the University and studying Mathematics and Sports Science. She took us to the Student Union building to stock up on water and snacks for the next days racing. Once at the hotel and having had dinner the team retired to Suite 9 to take on the "name game" challenge with the end objective of each person being able to remember the name of each of the 31 people in the circle. At the end of the game Connie successfully took on the challenge to name each of the team before going onto play "koosh"game and creating our own quiz. The adults team won the quiz - we were very pleased to have two retired school teachers in our midst!

At 9pm, at the end of the swimmers' free time we've never seen so many of the team in the same room! Lights out at 21:30 to get ready for the next day's racing.

After an 08:00 rise, breakfast, team talk, face paints, fancy dress and photos by John Rowley, our President, the team walked to Ponds Forge accompanied by Maria Noguer and Sam Sansome our travelling Officials; Craig Oliver and Derek Carley our County Coach and Assistant County Coach respectively plus Liz Rowley, John's wife who is a qualified Team Manager and fantastic support! Following warm up, the Captains of Berkshire and South Bucks - Zara Ryan and Joshua Goble wearing full fancy dress with a stag's head, led the opening ceremony, cheered in by the rest of our team and then it was down to some serious swimming for every point.

Division one has 20 teams and points are allocated with 20 points for a first and descending to 1 point for 20th. There are two seeded heats for each event with the faster swimmers racing in the second heat.

All but one of our swimmers had been at Ponds Forge before so most were familiar with the pool and that helped them hit the ground running...and once they started they didn't stop. 75% of all individual swims were PB's some small and some up to 3 seconds. Of the 25% who didn't PB all were within 1 second of their PB and in total contributed an incredible 65 points to our team's final total. 7 of our total swims (23%) were placed 4th and above; 10(33%) fell between 5th and 10th place and 12(39%) between 11th and 15th.

All the relay teams swam faster than last year cutting off just under 12 seconds cumulative giving next years County Team the opportunity to swim in the fastest heat of the relays in 5 of the possible 7 relays. A very solid foundation for next year to build on.

Details of all the swims and splits can be found at the end of this report, and the complete championship results on www.swimming.org/countyteamchamps .

It was an incredible effort and we bobbed between 6th place and 10th in the Division but finally finished, a finally confirmed and very well earned 7th overall. A great result!

Lancashire won Division one for the 13th consecutive year.

Each member of the team was a credit to the County.

Thank you to Maria Noguer and Sam Sansome for officiating - we couldn't have done what we did without you; Craig Oliver supported by Derek Carley for creating the environment over the last two days that allowed all that happened to happen; and last but not least our County President, John Rowley and his fantastic wife and talented Team Manager, Liz.

I wish you all the best for this coming year.

Joan Scarrott
County Team Manager

Additional photographs: Click on any photograph for a larger image

The Team

The Results

The Placings