Onward and Upward for 2020

Happy New Year to all! 

Competitive progress has been great during the first half of the 2019/2020 season. This has been aided by a new squad system featuring Senior, Intermediate and Junior squads. The aim is to provide a system that allows all competitors to improve as much as possible. What’s required is 100% attendance. As the Director of the American Swimming Coaches Association says the secret to swimming is “Turn up”. From time to time individuals are sick or injured. If this happens the coaches need to know in advance. So for the rest of the year let’s try for maximum attendance from everyone. If you only attend half of the sessions your improvement will be about 20% of what it could be. Competitive swimming is like other endurance activities-you have to put in the training hours!

Two of our most prominent Seniors have major competitions this month:

Andrew Feenan, the only Cork swimmer on the Swim Ireland Performance Pathway squad aiming at the 2024 Paris Olympics, competes with the Irish team in an International Meet in Geneva from January 17 to 19. We wish him well in this competition after his excellent performances in the Short Course Nationals.

UCC scholarship holder Sean O’Riordan, who competed for Ireland at last year’s Para World Championships, is on a possible panel for the Paralympics in Tokyo in both the 400m Freestyle and 100m Breast stroke. He will attempt automatic qualification at the Leinster Long Course Championships in Dublin on January 18 and 19. The qualification times are extremely tough with only one Irish para-swimmer pre-qualifying. Sean is continuing to improve so we wish him the best in this and other competitions later in the spring.

Tom Cross

SWSC President