Berks and South Bucks
County Championships

Day 4 Report

The long haul of the Berks and South Bucks county championships closed on Saturday with several highlights for Reading SC swimmers at Maidenhead's Magnet Pool.

Members of head coach Graeme Thomas's top squads were warming up for a pre-Easter training camp in Slovenia, which will involve two sessions a day of hard work and in the pool as well as dry land training.

The girls' youth freestyle relay quartet of Louisa Downs, Holly Tanner, Amy Kunicki and Kristina Paige set off on the right foot with a 4 x 100m meet record in a great tussle with Wycombe District, dominant in the mid-range girls' age groups this season.

Downs led off, Tanner established what proved to be a winning lead in the second leg, Kunicki held off a challenge and Paige - at 14 the youngest member - brought home the gold with the fastest leg of the four.

Reading "B" (Amy Thomas, Louisa Herring, Leanne Haas and Leona Jones) were an excellent fourth in the field of nine.

The girls had to settle for a silver in the medley event. The B team, with Naomi Herring coming in on backstroke, were again fourth, while the boys' quartet of Garry Dixon, Alex Macarthur, York Kloeppel and Craig Frankum placed third twice.

Dixon, 16, and Macarthur, 14, produced Reading's top male swims of the afternoon session. Substantial 200 freestyle PBs of 1.58.68 and 2.02.51 brought age group gold and silver respectively.

Dixon also lifted the junior championship for swimmers still under 17 at the end of the year, and went on to match this in the 400 IM, while Adam Barrett won his year.

Seventeen-year-old Leona Jones completed an excellent breaststroke series by adding the 50m overall championship trophy to the 100 she won two weeks previously and her 200m silver in week one.

Paige also turned on the style in the 100 free, fourth in the overall final in 1.02.29 - doing particularly well to qualify as a pre-meet best of 1.05.36 meant she had to do it from a relatively slow heat. Downs and Tanner, ninth and 10th overall, were reserves for the eight-lane final but were not called up.

The PBs began among the 12-year-olds. Natalia Ciecierska-Holmes cut her entry time by a second and a half to 1.12.38 and Eleanor Cawthorne beat hers by well over two seconds, recording 1.11.29.

Rachael Mills, 13, and Frankie Wilkins, 12 – who had earlier recorded Southeast Regional qualifying times in the 400 free, Wilkins winning her year - also shone over the shorter distance with PBs of 1.06.91 and 1.07.62 respectively.

Turning 13 on the last day of the championships means Mills had to swim in that age group throughout the series, but she made light of this in the 200m butterfly with a strong 2.46.50 to win the age group. Wilkins's 2.42.28 again won her year.

The 200 fly is a major challenge for younger swimmers, and Cawthorne reeled off an exemplary heat win in 3.04.73 (from an entry time of 3.27), while Georgie Wilkins took a bronze in the 11s age group with a 28-second PB in 3.17.63.

Holly Tanner, 16, produced her best fly swim this season. A time of 2.27.11 in the fastest heat - all events longer than 100 metres at county level are decided on heat times - gave her the overall bronze behind Katie Ambridge of Wycombe, who has dominated the 15/16 age group this year, and Bracknell's Emma Boret.

Paige's 2.33.13 gave her the bronze in the junior category.

The girls' heats closed with the 100 IM, where Reading's top swim relative to entry time came from 11-year-old Ellie Wood, who slashed her previous best of 1.29.89 to 1.26.12.

Adam Barrett pulled out Reading's best male swim of the evening and one of the best in the whole series in the 100 backstroke. Entered on 1.09.38, he stormed through his heat in 1.06.59. This produced a landmark first ever county championship final.

Called up from reserve after a late withdrawal, the 13-year-old had to sprint to the start. Although understandably short of his heat time, Barrett still recorded a career second-best 1.07.75 to finish eighth after pressing the much older field all the way.

Markus Orgill was Reading's other PB in the heats, taking a second off his best in 1.11.98.

Barrett also slashed his previous best in the 50 freestyle, getting it down to 28.04. Kristian Statham, 16, beat 27 seconds for the first time, recording 26.96 just behind Macarthur (26.78) and Frankum (26.86) in the next heat.

Among the younger swimmers, James Bradley produced a 0.4 second PB - a substantial cut over just two lengths - in 33.34.

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Chris Ferguson and Zoe Hester, who joined Reading from Basingstoke after the Berks and South Bucks entry deadline, have starred at the Hampshire championships. Ferguson, 14, finished top all-round boy in his year, while Hester's top swim won the county championship 100 backstroke trophy in a time of 1.07.75.

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