On Monday 23rd October, we had our first Abbotsleigh Club Night for Term 4. It was a great opportunity for swimmers to gain some race practice with a number of our young swimmers gaining SMNE qualifying times. We also had the chance to welcome our new members who have joined the club over the last few months. They were presented with their Abbotsleigh caps and we look forward to them being a part of Team Abb!
Thank you to all the parents for timekeeping and helping us run the nights. We wouldn’t be able to run these events without parent support.
On the 14th & 15th of October the Abbotsleigh gold and black squads went to Sydney Olympic park to participate on the 2023 NSW LC qualifying meet. This was a targeted meet for these group as part of their planning and preparation for later December comps.
The intent was to apply the race skills and efficient race plans that they had been working on at training and be able to execute them under a slightly more competitive environment. The meet was a success with a lot of State times achieved as well as National times. Everyone applied themselves and worked within the best of their abilities.
It is amazing to see these athletes challenging themselves and understanding that planning and preparation is key for success.
On Saturday 7th October, our Abbotsleigh team came together to race at the Lane Cove Invitational LC Meet. This was our first Long Course (LC) meet of the season and was a great chance to bring 30 swimmers from White, Black & Gold squads altogether. Arriving at 7:45am, we could complete our Flow activation and warmup as a team.
Throughout the day, our swimmers did an excellent job adapting to an outdoor 50m pool. Swimmers applied the technique and skills they had been working on into their races. We saw some great underwaters, breakouts, and speed building through to the finish.
It was fantastic to see the unity of our team as our swimmers cheered each other on from pool side. Swimmers took on feedback and thought on areas for future improvement as we move into the Summer season.
Thank you to the parents and grandparents for bringing swimmers to Lane Cove and assisting with timekeeping when required.
What a great start to a promising summer season ahead!
Short course is a wrap. We continued to show our learnings from this season at Australian Short course in Sydney.
Individual qualifiers Zac Attard, Shaun Champion and Audrey Jackson all achieved personal beat swims at the championship.
Audrey Jackson broke through with a 0.25 second best in the 50m freestyle. Audrey improved her ranking by 14 placings at her first Open meet. This great swim gave her a position in the B final. Her first finals experience at state or national level. Audrey qualified at Senior state two weeks prior. She put her reflections into action, made the race plan adjustments and won her heat. She finished 10th in her B final. Congratulations Audrey! It was great to see you soak up your finals experience.
Zac Attard swam the B final in the 200m Freestyle, on the opening night of competition. Zac exhibited his skills in this event. Zac improved from senior state, by 2.2 seconds and swim faster in the final. Congratulations Zac!
Shaun also improved from senior state. Shaun won silver in the 200m Freestyle, starting is week off with a bang, improving his personal best by 1 second. Shaun used technical improvements to help maintain his high standards and accumulated great racing intent.
He placed 4th in the 50m and 100m butterfly, both with season best times.
For the first time we swam 2 mixed relays, both placing in the Top 10.
Medley relay swimmers in relay order…
Shaun Champion, Ryan Hansen, Jasmin Foster, Audrey Jackson.
All swimmers produced their best efforts and lifted for each other. It was a great bonding experience. It was great to watch races with our swimmers, to talk about racing, the technical requirements and see their motivation to improve themselves. They could see what they need to do. We look forward to next year, as many more swimmers approach this level of competition.
Congratulations to all our Short Course competitors.
Go Team Abb!!!
Ready to go !!4×50 Medley RelayAudrey Jackson – B Finalist4×50 Mixed Fs relay
Congratulations to our 17 swimmers who raced at Junior State on the weekend! This is the final event of our short course season for our juniors. It was fantastic to see swimmers swim to their race plans and put into practice what had been practiced at training. We worked hard at implementing our dives, turns, and changeovers that we have been practicing and we made sure we finished hard into the walls. Swimmers did a great job warming up and racing together, and cheering on their teammates, demonstrating great unity in Team ABB. Many positives can be taken from the weekend as well as many learnings for future improvement.
Top Ten Finishes:
April Avery – 9th place – 12yrs Girls 50 Breaststroke
Penelope Waterhouse – 8th place – 10yrs Girls 50 Backstroke
Girls 10-11 4×50 Medley Relay – 10th place (2.97 second improvement) – Penelope Waterhouse, Zoe Durbidge, Alicia Chung, Alice Liu
Girls 12 4×50 Medley – 11th place – Isabella Zhao, Gigi Windeyer, April Avery, Abby Philpot
Girls 12 4×50 Freestyle Relay – 11th place – Abby Philpot, Gigi Windeyer, Bailey Butler, Emma Bao
Thank you to our parents for supporting swimmers throughout the meet and assisting with timekeeping when required.
On 1st to the 3rd of September the Senior Abbotsleigh swim team went to Sydney Olympic Park to race at Senior State championships This is a competition with all the best in the state area.
The Abbotsleigh swimming club had a team of 16 swimmers and 6 relay teams. It was a meet full of fun moments and with a lot of good energy. The swimmers showed the ability to embrace the meet and focus when needed.
The team support that was felt throughout the meet was great and once again TEAM Abbotsleigh showed their spirit in staying together and supporting each teammate.
Our relay teams up their game and we had 4 teams coming in the top ten and mention to our girls 13-15 4×50 Fs relay that with an awesome team PB broke the 2 minute mark and came from 10th into 7th place overall. Also the boys 17& over Fs relay from the last heat end up coming 4th overall
The Abbotsleigh swimming Club had a total of 15 Top 10
We would like to give a special mention to all the swimmers that participate on the team relays, it was great to see their amazing team effort into representing our club in the best way they could. Relays are a very important part of swimming; they define the bond between teammates and ourclub values. – Kaizen, Dare greatly, Unity, Fun.
Go team ABB.
)
Relay teams: Girls A 13-15 4×50 Fs relay – Syesha Anthony / Audrey Jackson / Grace Black / Piper Marinas Girls B 13-15 4×50 Fs relay – Claudia Liu/Chanel Kang/Tinglan Chen/ Noor khara
Girls A 13-15 4×50 Medley relay – Chanel kang/ Claudia Liu / Audrey Jackon/ Syesha Anthony Girls B 13-15 4×50 Medley relay-Grace Black/Tinglan Chen/Piper Marinas/Matilda Mamo
Boys A 16&O 4×50 Fs relay – Shaun Champion/Zachary Attard/Ryan Hanse/Jensen Goodchild Boys A 16&) 4×50 Medley relay-Zachary Attard/Ryan Hansen/Shaun Champion/Jensen Goodchild
Shaun’s outstanding performances at the World Trials granted him selection to World Champs in Japan. Shaun’s events were 50m and 100m butterfly at the Fukuoka World Championships. Shaun would compete on day 1 and day 6 of the campaign. With a five-week preparation from selection, the Australian Dolphin’s team met in Saga, a smaller prefect of Japan.
Saga was a great place to prepare and to become familiar living as a team. We had setbacks of lightning strikes and emergency landslide warnings, which we received in Japanese scribe on our phones at 6am on morning…the warning was for a town nearby. The rain didn’t stop for the first few days which turned out being helpful, allowing us to acclimatise slowly to very hot conditions. Here the routine was eat, sleep, swim and repeat. The team were bonding well, and we were building our energy towards something special.
Shaun and I were able to enjoy a Tea ceremony, and authentic protocol for making tea and enjoying tea, something treasured in Japanese culture. We also learnt how to write Japanese calligraphy by local school children. Shaun used his Japanese heritage, speaking quite well to the high school students…they were most impressed that he knew their native tongue.
We arrived at the Competition venue in Fukuoka, and it was fast paced, especially compared to Saga. Lots of people, big city life and very hot! Warm up pool was the same too…very hot and space limited.
Our Team ABB value of KAIZEN is a Japanese word meaning continuous improvement. KAIZEN brings out our love of learning and working at making things better. We are full of experiences, both in performance and culturally, and are motivated to move forward.
Daring Greatly is definitely something you do at a World Championships. Everyone is at their best and working at their performance execution. Shaun comes away with great learnings from this exposure and his ability to put his best together when the time came. Whilst outcomes are not shown on the scoreboard, the takeaways are profound. I also have my learnings to bring back and will keep growing from the experience.
I was privileged to lead the Mixed 4×100 Freestyle team, selected a heat team and final team and having this unique combination got us a position in the final and then to finish ahead of the world.
Flynn Southam, Jack Cartwright, Madi Wilson and Meg Harris played their role in the heats and then it was up to the final team, Jack Cartwright, followed by Kyle Chalmers, changing over with Shayna Jack and Mollie O’Callaghan. The outcome from all 7 athletes delivered a World Record, Gold medal winning achievement. This team broke Australia’s World Record from Budapest, Hungary in 2022. The team swam in a different order to the previous record holding team. Another chance to sing Advance Australia Fair.
The Dolphins team is a special unit, there was purpose to our actions from team selection to our final team dinner. We worked for each other, we did what needed to happen and the outcome is written in history. The most successful Australian team, we beat USA for the second time ever, we won 13 gold medals.
We had a great return to the Abb invitational Meet on the 6th August. Lots of energy and excitement filled the aquatic centre.
It was fantastic to see our Abb values upheld throughout the day. Swimmers were daring greatly in their racing and always thinking about how they can continuously improve (KAIZEN) by implementing what they had been practicing at training. We had lots of fun in our relays and around the pool, and it was great to hear our team cheering showing great unity in the Golden Flipper relay. The Golden Flipper relay is a unique event that saw clubs vying for the Golden Flipper trophy. Let’s fight for it next year!
Our fantastic parents and older swimmers helped to make the day a success. Many roles were undertaken beforehand and throughout the day and we thank our community for being so willing to get involved and help the day run smoothly. It was great to see our swimmers leave smiling after a fantastic meet. We thank the clubs that came and participate in our event, and we look forward to an even bigger and better Abbotsleigh Invitational in 2024!
On the 14th – 16th of July, the Abbotsleigh swimming club team joined all the best clubs in the metropolitan area and participated at the NSW metropolitan championships. We had a total of 14 swimmers competing at these championships. This meet was at the end of the school holidays and the teams plan was to do some good quality work during the break and be ready for these championships. We knew that SC metropolitan championships is a tough one where there is combined age groups and a lot of intensity swim after swim. We had great results across all age groups with PB’s, top 10 finishes and a bronze medal.
Result totals:
Medal – 1 Bronze – Tinglan Chen- 100BS
Top 5 finishes: 2
Top 10 finishes: 7
Our energy was always up throughout the 3 days meet, athletes understood the importance of recovering well and getting themselves in the best spot of being successful by keeping their body well refuelled during 3 days of competition. This is an important part of athlete development.
It is important to say that this is a meet where Junior and Senior swimmers are together and more than ever the team was always supportive to each other and showed amazing camaraderie across all the different ages, from Junior to seniors if it was an Abbotsleigh swimmer everyone was watching and cheering.
The work will keep on going and now we start our preparation for Senior and Junior State championships. Go Abbotsleigh!
We welcome coach Callum as our new team member with a wonderful display of racing throughout the weekend. Our swimmers have been focusing on holding their technique and challenging themselves at a variety of races, including longer events and branching out to different stroke and especially the 200IM.All your coaches loved what you brought to each race.
There were many highlights, the standout was how you supported each other. It was great to see you learning from each other and from each race. We love relays and for the first time we were able to enter A, B, C and D relays for girls 8-13 years and we had relays in each age bracket. The energy on both days for these relays was fantastic.
Six relay teams finished inside the top 10…
Female 13/u 4×50 medley relay 4th
Grace Black, Tina Chen, Emma Bao, Noor Khara
Female 13/u 4×50 free relay 9th
Grace Black, Abby Philpot, Tina Chen, Emily Lin
Female 14/o 4×50 medley relay 5th
Piper Marinas, Syesha Anthony, Jazzy Foster, Leisel Tan
Oliver Liu, Joel Ramsay, Cameron Green, Henry Moore
Male 14/o 4×50 medley relay 8th
Marcus Primdal, Jensen Goodchild, Zac Attard, Oliver Liu
We had 54 placings in the top 10 finishes and…8 individual medallist!!!!Congratulations…
It is worth mentioning that 9 swimmers placed 4th too…what a great result for Team ABB!
GOLD Grace Black 50 backstroke
GOLD Alice Liu 50 breaststroke
GOLD Holly Nelson 100 butterfly
SILVER Grace Black 50 butterfly
SILVER Tina Chen 200 breaststroke
SILVER Alice Liu 100 breaststroke
SILVER Gigi Windeyer 50 breaststroke
BRONZE Tina Chen 100 breaststroke
Alice Liu 50Brs -Gold 100Brs-SilverGigi Windeyer 50Brs – Silver Tina Chen 200Brs-silver 100Brs-Bronze Grace Black 50Bk-Gold 50Fly – Silver
It is worth mentioning that 9 swimmers placed 4th too…what a great result for Team ABB!
Thank you to parents who had official roles at the meet and to all families for contributing to making the weekend a fun experience. Thank you to our coaches, Jay, showing is belief in each swimmer and for Callum, to take in all that is Team Abb! Great energy all round
