Swimming The 2014 GPS season was another big success for both the Junior and Senior schools. The Championships Day saw The Southport School finish second in both competitions, with the Senior Team just seven points behind Churchie. This meant TSS has finished in the top three for the past 12 years and in the top two for nine of the past 12 years!
LIAM DU FEU
Director of Swimming
100m Butterfly, the Open 6x50 Freestyle Relay (Josh Nielsen, Sam Horton, Lachlan Colquhoun, Nick Ruan, Josh Parrish and Michael Mincham) and the 16’s 4x50m Medley Relay (Tom Underwood, Cooper van der Laan, Cameron Usher and Stan MackayPayne).
OPEN TEAM DOMINANCE
In the new GPS format the Juniors swam the first-ever Junior GPS Championships (5-7 years) before the senior competition. The second-place finish behind Churchie was a massive result and started the day on a big high! David Proud, Head Junior Coach, along with Janice Cole, David Thomas and Mandy Morgan, have done a superb job over the years. To finish second behind Churchie with considerably fewer swimmers to pick from is a superb result and shows the quality of the coaching and athletes in our junior program.
The standout performances in the Senior competition came from the Open swimmers as they have done for some many years. The Opens 4x50 metre Medley relay smashed the GPS record by over 1.5 seconds, with the winning team made up by Jake Kersten, Grayson Bell, Dom Richardson and Bryton Heiniger. Other wins came from Michael Mincham in the 400m Freestyle, Grayson Bell in the 100m Breaststroke, Dom Richardson in the
With so many other GPS competitions being solely focused on the Opens to bring home the Premiership it’s important recognise the impressive record our TSS Swimming Opens have achieved under the guidance of High Performance Coach Chris Nesbit. TSS has produced the top Opens team at GPS (winning more Open events than any other school) in eight of the past 10 GPS competitions. Finishing second on two occasions behind Nudgee in 2010 and 2011 (2010 Chris Nesbit was not working at TSS and in 2011 Chris had been back at TSS for three months). In 12 years TSS has won 962 points out of a possible 1200 in all open events. This not only shows the strength of our Opens program, but also how well TSS develop our swimmers throughout their schooling.
The Championship day was finished off with another awesome presentation night, organised by Danielle Statham at the Surfers Paradise Surf Club. The support from our parents, as always, was THE SOUTHPORT SCHOOL SOUTHPORTONIAN 2014
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