The first five months of hard training in the swimming season paid off for six competitive swimmers from Ross; Freya Phelps, Eddy Taylor, Isabelle Sayce, Matthew Ford, Phoebe Ruck and Jasmine Hoult, at the Worcester County Swimming Championships. This small section of the City of Hereford Swimming Club qualified for 30 swims between them, more than doubling 2015’s tally.

Andy Boucher, Director of Swimming for Ross-on-Wye section told the Ross Gazette:?“The numbers of qualifiers and overall performance at the championships exceeded expectations.”

The group achieved personal bests and Eddy Taylor’s outstandingly well-disciplined swim earnt possibly the first county medal for 10 years for a Ross swimmer.

Herefordshire and Worcestershire form a joint county area for this competition which means that the youngsters were up against swimmers from the large clubs on the southern edge of the West Midlands conurbation. Spread over two weekends, the events are divided into heats and finals for 50m and 100m races, and heat declared winners for longer distances.

The girls 100m Individual Medley kicked off with a massively exciting start. Following the heat swims Freya lay in sixth place with fourth to sixth positions separated by 0.3 of a second. This was Freya’s first experience of a championship final and despite bettering her heat time by more than a second, the rest of the field proved too strong for her to improve on her qualifying position, although this may have been in part due to swimming a massive personal best to finish seventh in the 400m freestyle just beforehand.

Event three was the boys 200m Breaststroke and it was Eddy’s turn to try and come back from having missed out on a podium finish in 2015 by one place. He beat Stourbridge’s James Froggatt by just 0.3 second to take the silver behind fellow City of Hereford swimmer, Nathan Gough.

Eddy’s medal success injected a new vigour and sense of urgency into the afternoon swims and Freya, not to be outdone, qualified in second place for the 50m Backstroke final in the 10/11 year age group.

A rule change for this year’s championships meant that her training partner, Isabelle had to compete in the 12 year age group where, despite being one of the younger swimmers, she narrowly missed out on a place in the finals. Matthew Ford had qualified for the 50m Fly, despite only having been with the club for a couple of months and knocked out a solid swim to take a second off his entry time. In the 50m backstroke Freya shaved over a second off her qualifying time in the final to take silver, making the medal tally one a piece for the girls and boys at the end of day one.

The second day also started brightly with Freya qualifying for the 50m freestyle final and fellow Ross swimmer Jasmine missing out, despite being only one second behind her. This time she missed out on a podium place by just 0.2 seconds, despite swimming yet another personal best time. Earlier in the session Eddy qualified in third place for the 100m Breaststroke, also just missing out in the final. The session saw Isabelle take on one of the most gruelling swimming events, the 400m Individual medley (where swimmers have to swim 100m of each stroke). It is a massive achievement to qualify for this and she managed a respectable fifth place with a strong swim.

In the 100m Backstroke Isabelle narrowly missed out on a place in the final by less than a second, whilst Freya took over two seconds off her heat swim to net a second gold medal. Eddy Taylor, keen to level the score on the medal front made the 100 IM and 50 BR finals but didn’t manage to make a podium finish.

Phoebe, who was also competing at her first championships in the 50BR, gave a respectable performance. Isabelle managed her best position of the tournament in her signature event, the 200 BK (finishing eighth).

Mr Boucher added:?“After last year when we so narrowly missed out on medal places for the swimmers to have made so many finals, and brought back the medals they did, deserves massive congratulations.

“It really does go to show that hard work can pay off and the Ross section of the club is moving from strength to strength”.

The club is always on the look out for promising seven to nine year olds, for more information contact Andy Boucher, Director of Swimming – Ross-on-Wye.