Chorley Shrimps Gala

From our poolside YAV reporter Amelie Elliott

Some of our swimmers took to the pool for the first time in a competitive environment against our friends at Chorley Marlins.

With help from Carole Jepson and others, the Leyland Barracudas Young Aquatic Volunteers (YAVs) were given the opportunity to organise and run the annual Chorley and Leyland Shrimps gala.

This is an event which has run for many years now, normally at Chorley but this year, due to being unable to run it at All Seasons Leisure Centre, Chorley Shrimps came to Leyland.

Like many of the other older swimmers I can still remember very clearly how scared I was when I was 8 and competed at my first Chorley Shrimps. Swimming backstroke at Chorley was awful and I think I swam at least 30 metres instead of 25 as I zig zagged down the pool crashing into the lane ropes. Despite this I survived, avoid swimming backstroke when I can and remember what a good experience it was to get me used to doing competitions.

In last few years the competition has been organised by the Young Aquatic Volunteers (YAVs) as part of our training programme.

Many of the young swimmers competing at Chorley and Leyland Shrimps will know us because we also help on poolside at different sessions once a week.

This year’s event was organised (with a bit of help) by Jack Hepplestone, Ella Blundell, Danielle Brady, Georgia Brockbank, Eve Pedley, Olivia Robinson, Grace Adams and myself (Amelie Elliott). We all volunteered for a job – whether it was promoting the event, collecting entry money, sorting out raffle prizes and wrist bands, checking that swimmers had arrived, setting up entries on Swim Manager, processing results or writing a final report.

On the day we helped to run the event, marshall the swimmers and assisted with refereeing and timekeeping – which was all part of our course.

The event provides an excellent opportunity for the 7/8 and 9-year-old swimmers to practice racing and win some medals.

This year we unfortunately had a few swimmers that were ill and could not take part but we still had 12 swimmers from Chorley and 31 swimmers from Leyland taking part.

The races were all 25 metres long and medals were awarded to the top three in each age group.

All the swimmers were fantastic and hopefully they all enjoyed the experience. A full list of results will be available on the club website but here are our winners:

Girls 8 and under backstroke: Eloise Tranah

Girls 9 and over backstroke : Erin Morris

Boys 8 and under backstroke: Oliver Rankin-Edward

Boys 9 and over backstroke: Thomas Owens

Girls 8 and under backstroke: Effie Scorah

Girls 9 and over breaststroke: Caoimhe Ruscoe

Boys 8 and under breaststroke: Oliver Rankin-Edward

Boys 9 and over breaststroke: Adam Khan (Chorley)

Girls 8 and under butterfly – Amelie Pickup

Girls 9 and over butterfly – Caoimhe Ruscoe

Boys 8 and under butterfly – Oliver Rankin-Edward

Boys 9 and over butterfly – Thomas Owens

Girls 8 and under freestyle – Eloise Tranah

Girls 9 and over freestyle – Erin Morris

Boys 8 and under freestyle- Oliver Rankin-Edward

Boys 9 and under freestyle – Adam Khan (Chorley)

With such an excellent group of swimmers to pick from I’m sure that Gill will now have a very difficult job to do in picking the 9 year old swimmers for this year’s Micro A and B teams!

Amelie Elliott, Young aquatic volunteer