Arena League Round 1 Report

31 Oct 2024

The first Salisbury team gala for a long time saw the team travel to Portsmouth for the first round of the Arena League.

We are currently in the South Region, West Division 2 and were competing against teams from Kingston, Chichester, Wey Valley, Cranleigh, Dorking and Seaclose. We were allocated lane 1 for the gala and although the warm-up was chaotic due to limited time, everyone was well prepared for this, having had 30 swimmers in 4 lanes at Godolphin for the training session the night before.

Space was extremely limited on poolside and all the swimmers are learning to be comfortable performing on these types of occasions with limited preparation time and space. We were clearly the best kitted out team with hats, face paint and temporary tattoos and we were also the loudest by far! All the team cheered for every one of our swimmers from the first race to the last and the support for each other was fantastic throughout the whole evening.

From the first race to the last, all of our swimmers were amazing. Out of the 32 individual events, there were 14 personal best times and another 10 swims within a second of their best time. We had 6 first places (Justin, Jessica, Emily, Samuel and the boys 11/u FC and Medley relay teams of Toby, Alfie, Sam, Matthew, and Otis), lots of second and third places and not a single disqualification all evening. We finished with a total of 262 points coming second behind Kingston Royals who finished with 293 points. This was an incredible achievement given this was the first time most of our swimmers had competed in gala of this type with such an atmosphere.

The results of all the galas have been published on the Arena League website this week and we now await the draw for the next round where we will find out the teams we will be swimming against and the location.

As always, I would like to say a big thank you to the team managers, Natasha and Helen, for their hard work all evening, to James, as coach, for supervising warm-ups and engaging the swimmers in pre- and post-race discussions, and to Amanda and Andrew for volunteering as officials.

The swimmer’s behaviour on the coach to the gala, the cramped poolside and the return coach journey was brilliant, and the team spirit showed by all swimmers taking part and from the supporters in the gallery was fantastic, demonstrating what a great club we have and how proud we should all be to be part of it.

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