FOBISIA SWIMMING INVITATIONAL 2023

Joe Denton Cross Campus Assistant Head Swim Coach, Bangkok Patana School

On Friday 27th – Sunday 29th January 2023, Bangkok Patana School played host to the FOBISIA Swim Invitational 2023; this was the first opportunity since January 2019 that members of FOBISIA were able to compete back in the water alongside each other. This invitational provided the opportunity for just under 800 students from 23 schools across 6 different countries to compete at a FOBISIA swimming competition once again, the largest to date! Representation of schools included those from Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Brunei, Bangladesh, and Laos.

The competition provided some fantastic competitive races across the weekend with a great display of talent across all age groups, despite the pandemic, the quality of swimming amongst the FOBISIA community hadn’t slowed down. The meet began on Friday 27th with mixed relays and 400m individual events, providing a great balance of speed and endurance. This fantastic opening to the weekend was certainly helped by the spectating parents creating a real buzz around poolside cheering on all swimmers. It was fantastic to see parents travel from overseas to help support their children and their team. Saturday and Sunday provided a full day of competing with the opportunity for swimmers to compete in all 50 & 100m events with the one heat per age group for the 200m events. On top of these events, we had the single gender relays also, these provided some fantastic head-to-head racing with the leads changing throughout.

Swimmers, coaches, and spectators had the opportunity to visit multiple food & beverage and retail vendors throughout the weekend, this helped provide an ‘athlete village’ feel by the 50m pool and this area was certainly popular with all visitors. After the conclusion of the meet, awards were given to the top 3 individual point scorers per age group along with the overall team scores. Congratulations to all swimmers who competed throughout the weekend. The overall team results saw Bangkok Patana winning the FOBISIA Swim Invitational this year, they were followed by Alice Smith School from Kuala Lumpur in second place and Bangkok Prep in third. After this invitational, FOBISIA swimming is certainly back and it will be exciting to see if continue to evolve next year!