The Christmas Cracker swim meet held at Saanich Commonwealth Place on Dec. 3 weekend was a success for the Sooke Tyee swimmers.
Many goals were met and new ones were made.
Tyee swimmers achieved difficult time standards and out of the 22 races that Sooke swimmers competed in there were 17 personal best times.
Coach Marissa Nadin said she is proud of these swimmers and has seen huge improvements among all of them over their last few months of training.
In the new year, there will be two huge meets coming up – AA and AAA – where the swimmers need to achieve specific time standards for their age group to qualify.
There are a couple of swimmers that are racing towards these standards with the hopes of qualifying for these meets and Nadin said those goals are possible and will be a huge feat for the team.
With the success of the competitive Sooke Tyee team, there will be a new pre-competitive Tyee program at SEAPARC in January with the hopes of building up a next generation of competitive swimmers in Sooke.
Some of the highlights of the Christmas Cracker Meet were:
Raleigh McKeown – 800-metre freestyle. This is an incredible difficult race and he was swimming against boys much older and bigger than him and he came out with a 10:56.20. “This time is incredible and it completely exceeded my expectations. He gave it his absolute all and succeeded,” Nadin said.
Clarke Hopkins –100M backstroke seed time was 1:31.83 and he came out with a 1:22.49. “Besides the fact that this was a massive best time, of all of Clarke’s races it was the one that showed the most skill improvement,” Nadin said.
Nick Ralph –100M fly seed time 1:16.42 and came out with a 1:13.53. “In this race Nick achieved his first AAA of the season and even beat the standard by a whole second,” Nadin said.
Tyrell Wydenes –100m fly seed time 1:46.65 and came out with 1:33.92. “This was one of our best times of the meet. The technique, the pacing and the stamina shown in this race astounded me. It was quite the race to see,” Nadin said.