What a fantastic weekend of competitive, exciting and fun swimming for REN96 at Irvine’s Portal swimming pool, with personal bests, medals and first competitive swims galore! Meeting old rivals and friends from north and south Ayrshire, Kilmarnock, Stranraer, Bellshill, West Dumbartonshire, Bishopbriggs, Rutherglen, Glasgow and Renfrew spurred on REN96’s swimmers to perform superbly.
Saturday was the turn of 25 of REN96’s 12-years-and-over swimmers in a range of events from the 50m freestyle to the 400m individual medley and 400m freestyle. At this early time in the season REN96’s swimmers are working hard on their race processes and self-reflection after racing and not just using their recorded time to gauge the success of their swim. Some very mature awareness and thought processes lead to some incredible REN96 performances in the pool. Although it is early in the season, especially for the 400m middle-distance races REN96’s coaches were impressed by some tough racing, big personal bests and performances. Although personal bests and improvement are important measures of success, REN96’s swimmers also came home with 14 gold medals, 15 silver medals and 10 bronze medals - as well as many, many “I swam too fast” key rings!
Sunday saw REN96’s Foundation squad swimmers in action and they built on the achievements of their older team mates from Saturday. This meet was designed to give younger swimmers a first taste of competitive swimming and 25 REN96 swimmers took part, competing in three age groups (9-years-and-under, 10 years and 11 years). Racing 114 individual events, 65 of the times set by REN96 swimmers bettered their entry times and on the way there they collected 11 gold medals, 5 silver medals and 5 bronze medals.
Lead coach Alan Dickson said “These meets are invaluable for REN96’s younger members, as they afford our swimmers the chance to start putting the skills they learn in training into practice in competitions. Our swimmers were fantastic today especially considering it was the first time for some in a competitive environment. There are always learning points but I saw lots of examples of swimmers trying to stick to the process rather than getting overawed by the situation. Given the number of cancelled competitions at the tail end of last year it was great to be back competing in such healthy numbers - let’s hope these results are a sign of things to come this season.”
Well done to everyone who took part and REN96 swimmers say a big “thank you” to the coaches, team managers and technical official volunteers for all their hard work to make events like this such a success.
2024/2025 already looks like it’s going to be another great season for REN96!
Allan Kelly for REN96
