Whilst COSC’s potential Commonwealth, Olympic 2020 and GB swimmers are busy competing at Ponds Forge in Sheffield for the British Championships, the City of Oxford Academy and Rising Stars Gold swimmers are getting their final training sessions in place for Round 3 of the Chiltern League at Aqua Vale in Aylesbury on Saturday (22nd April) and Development Meet 6 at the Leys Pool on Sunday (23rd April). Meanwhile club’s county development and regional performance squads are training for the Wycombe Long Course (LC) Sprint Meet on Saturday.
City of Oxford Swimming Club (COSC) go into round 3 of the Chiltern League with 446 points and sitting third in the table. Round 1 saw Oxford finish second with 237 points, just behind leaders Four Shires on 242 and narrowly beating Bicester in third place on 235 points. In Round 2 COSC finished in third with 209 points, just behind Bicester Bluefins with 234 points and winners Four Shires with 260 points. With many of our young and successful swimmers returning for this final round, it’s going to be a closely swum battle for the top three places. Good luck swimmers and remember to take the spirit of working together as a team, that was clearly shown at the Easter Fun relays.
City of Oxford look forward to hosting our sixth development meet for the 2016/2017 season. Like our previous development meets, swimmers from Abingdon Vale, Four Shires, Didcot Barramundi, Wantage and Witney will join our own Academy swimmers to experience competitive swimming and some hope to achieve qualifying times for the County Championships in 2018 and the COSC Level 3 Open Meet in July. The schedule for this meet will see the boys competing in the 200m Freestyle, 200m Fly, 50m Backstroke and 100m Breastroke, while the girls compete in the 200m Backstroke, 100m Fly, 50m Breaststroke, 100m Freestyle and 50m Fly. If Development Meet 5 is anything to go by, we should see some truly amazing young swimmers put their honed skills to the test and produce some amazing swimming.
For those of you new to the COSC and in the Rising Star Squads, we highly recommend bringing your swimmers along to the development meet as a spectator as it gives them the opportunity to find out what is involved and experience the atmosphere before entering their first development meet. If want to get more involved in the club, Karen Underwood is running an Officials training course on Sunday from 1.30 – 3.30pm followed by a session during Development Meet 6 at the Leys Pool on Sunday.
City of Oxford CDAG, CDAB, CDY Squads and RPY swimmers who have not qualified for the SER Youth Championships, will be going to the Wycombe LC Sprint Meet hosted by Wycombe District Swimming Club to compete in 50, 100 and 200m events. Getting access to long course meets are important for the future development of our swimmers and we are pleased to attend this open meet. Good luck swimmers and we will be following the Twitter feed to see the results.