COMPETITION SECRETARY
Upcoming Competitions:
Scottish National Age Groups, 29 March-3 April
University of Aberdeen Long Course Meet, 29-30 April
Portobello Mad March Meet,29-30 April
Lothian Leagues round 2, 6 May
Haddington Total Swimmer, 7 May
Hearts Novice Meet, 14 May
SWL IM Tough Meet, 19-21 May
East District Open, 26-28 May
Lothian Leagues round 3, 3 June
ELST Distance, 9-11 June
Aquanauts Graded Meet, 24 June
More information about all external meets can be found on the Swim Scotland website http://www.swimscotland.co.uk/ - just find the meet and double click on its name and you will find information about the meet, including venue, warm up times and events.
Appeal for Officials
First of all, I wanted to say that it’s amazing to have seen all the swimmers competing in the many competitions we have had over the last few months. Well done to you all, you have been fantastic.
All of you will be aware that when I send out emails about competitions, I always have a section asking for officials. Those of you who are not timekeepers or judges probably just skip over that bit. However, I wanted to explain why it is important to have officials at external competitions.
When we have swimmers in a competition, we are asked to provide officials so that the meet can be accredited. There are rules about how many officials you need to have at a meet in order for the swimmers’ times to count for the bigger regional (East Districts) and national (Scottish National Age Groups) competitions – and if there are not enough officials provided by the clubs for these competitions, the times don’t count. For some competitions (eg East Districts), they send us a quota for officials and that quota is based on the number of swimmers we have in the competition – so the more swimmers we have, the more officials we’re asked to provide. If we don’t fill the quota, the club can be fined.
Recently I have been finding it difficult to get the number of officials we need for each competition. Even though there are a dependable group of parents who volunteer for every meet that their kids are in, I am still having to send out appeals for most competitions in order to get the numbers.
Also, we are very short on judges in the club – we have a couple of parents training to be judges at the moment but we always need more – for internal competitions as well as external ones.
So I wanted to ask all of you to consider the following:
· if you would be interested in training as a timekeeper
· if you have trained as a timekeeper but only timekeep at internal competitions,
please could you consider volunteering for some external competitions
· if you are a more experienced timekeeper, whether you would be prepared to train to be a judge
If you are interested, please contact me or Kathy about it. If you’re not sure what is involved and want to discuss it more, we’d be happy to talk to you about it or you can talk to other parents who are already timekeepers or judges. Thanks.
Angus Skakle: trip to Kenya
Angus is heading off to Kenya in June this year for 4 weeks with his school, Leith Academy, and Camps International. As well as learning about another country and climbing Mount Kenya, he is going there to help the local community. He doesn’t know exactly what he will be doing but previous expeditions have helped to build houses and schools. In order to fundraise for his trip, he is seeking sponsorship by swimming roughly 300 miles – the distance between Nairobi and Mombasa – and he’s mostly doing this in training. If you want to find out more or you would like to sponsor him, his JustGiving page is here:
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/angus-skakle
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Joshua Drainer
