Alnwick boys make splash in swim finals

The Yr 9/10 boys team of Josh Mungal, Mark Carolan, Oliver Thew and Gregor Batley were particularly successful in winning a bronze medal but on the day the best performance went to the Yr7/8 Junior Boys team who swam exceptionally well in the Front Crawl Relay to qualify for the National Finals at the London Aquatic Centre on the Olympic Park. This was a particularly excellent performance as two of the team, Conor Carolan and RuaridhBatley, are only in Yr 7, with the other two members, Edward Brown and Jake Davies, being in Yr 8.

They arrived at the Olympic Pool seeded 20th out of the 30 best teams in England and knew they would have to swim their socks off to get anywhere near the final and the top 10.

They were exceptional and knocked almost eight seconds off their converted qualification time to achieve the seventh fastest time overall and reach the final.

In the final they swam even faster with every swimmer hitting another pb, and even though they were still seventh, they were only 0.04 s off sixth and 0.5s off fourth. Ed Brown also swam the fastest 50m of any junior swimmer during the whole event.

To put this into context, the three teams who won medals in their event were all specialist swimming colleges and they beat two teams from other specialist swimming schools in the final.