National Summer Meet makes a welcome return

The National Summer Meet is Swim England’s biggest domestic swimming event of the year and it made a welcome return 5-9^th August 2022 after a three year gap. The Summer Meet forms part of a swimming competition structure in Great Britain whereby the top ranked swimmers are first invited to compete at the British Swimming Summer Championships and the next 20 ranked swimmers are invited to compete at the Nationals. The rankings are on swimmers’ performances at level 1 meets between a qualification window, typically between March and May of the same calendar year.

BSSC had five swimmers competing in the 2022 Summer Meet: Ella Greatbatch (14 yrs), Emma Fields (16 yrs), Lauren Gore (16 yrs), Callum Cox (16 yrs) and Jago Derrington (16 yrs). New BSSC member, Laura Burgess (16 yrs) competed for her old club.

All of these swimmers were new to this Summer meet, but all stepped up and gave brilliant performances – Ella, Laura, Lauren & Callum reached finals in their events and Ella & Callum medalled!

Having been inspired by Kirsty Neill’s silver medal winning performance at the recent British Championships, Ella Greatbatch gave us two personal best times and extremely close finishes in the heats and finals of the 14 years 200m Breaststroke, taking Gold by 0.13 seconds! She also won a Bronze medal in the 100m Breaststroke.

Callum Cox swam out of his skin in the 16 years 50m Butterfly, taking a second off his personal best time in the heat and another half a second off that new PB in the final to win the event! In fact, his Gold medal winning time was the fastest in Britain for his age group in the past 12 months, and would have won the British Championship event in the same pool two weeks earlier.

Lauren Gore came 8^th in a personal best time in the final of the 16 years 100m Breaststroke.

Laura Burgess (N&D PP SC) came 4^th in the final of the 16 years 100m Freestyle, dipping under the one minute barrier for the first time.

Huge congratulations should go to all the swimmers for their performances and also to BSSC head coach Benoit Grattepanche and former BSSC coach Mathieu Leroy for their support and guidance.