2017 Regional Swimmers: (l-r standing) Sophy Kendall, Beatriz Cunha, Lara Sinclair-Banks, Louis Mitchell, Caleb O’Brien, Katy Wilson, Libby Evans, Charlotte Preston, Keeley-Rose Richards, Charlotte Lund, (sitting) Archie Evans, Lucy Kendall, Harry Kendall, David Gillespie.
Fourteen swimmers from Corby Swimming Club qualified to compete at the prestigious Regional Championships this year and they produced some amazing swims. In total the clubs swimmers made over 30 finals, with Archie Evans leading the way and taking 5 Gold medals and a Silver medal in his six events, ranking him as one of the top performers of the meet. David Gillespie won two Silver medals in his sprint Butterfly events, Caleb O’Brien took Silver in his 50m Breastroke and Louis Mitchell took 1 Silver and 3 Bronze medals. Libby Evans also won Bronze in the 50m sprint freestyle event.
Corby finished 9th in the medal table for the competition overall which shows their fantastic improvement in the sport over recent years.
Louis Mitchell and David Gillespie now look forward to the Great Britain National Championships for over 14 year old swimmers which are being held in Sheffield at the end of July. The Nationals will see the top GB swimmers all in action with the winners then selected for Talent Programmes and International Teams. Good luck to both Corby swimmers.
Not to be outdone the junior swimmers from Corby competed in this years Leicester Diddy League, which attracted clubs from Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire. The Corby team won the first two rounds of the league and booked their place as favourites going into the final at the weekend and in a tense but exciting finale came away with first place and the title of Champions for 2017.
Corby Head Coach Tim Evans, a former International Swimmer himself was asked to comment on the recent successes at the club. ‘Corby Swimming Club is just going from strength to strength with some impressive results coming from all the swimmers. Swimming is a really brutal sport and there’s just no easy way to compete at the highest levels, basically at Corby the club is really well run and our volunteers need a huge pat on the back, our coaches are all really enthusiastic and we have a great culture for trying to maximise swimmers potential and progressing them through, but basically the swimmers all work really hard and have a great work ethic. The results speak for themselves – the Diddy League swimmers are the future and they’re up and coming plus we have five swimmers ranked in the top 24 in GB so they’re setting the bar as high as they can. I’m sure you will see more and more improvement and we are definitely all excited for the future.’