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AS swimmers from Harare meet at Les Brown Swimming Pool for the Mashonaland Senior Championships, programme convener Mary Mankola says they are looking forward to another exciting competition.
The competition was scheduled to start late yesterday, with swimmers from six clubs — Spartans, Otters, Sharks, Dorados, Highlands and Pirates — participating.
The championships are running over two weekends and this weekend’s event ends tomorrow, before competition resumes next Friday for another three days. Mankola said they are excited about the event and are looking forward to new talent at senior level as some juniors graduate to the next level.
“So this is where our team to compete at national level will come from. And basically we have been having galas during the season from when we opened the season in September. We were having junior and senior galas and again the kids have been building up to the championships.
“This is running over two weekends. What I know for a fact is, it’s always exciting and it’s a competition. You have got kids that have moved on, especially the kids at the level of university, they have gone. So obviously you have got new seniors coming up. So that should be exciting and the younger ones trying to beat the seniors in time because swimming is all about time.
“You are racing against yourself in the water, that’s basically what the kids are doing, they are racing against times that they have set already during the season,” said Mankola.
With the competition being a preparatory event for the national championships to be staged in Harare early next year, swimmers will be pushing for better times to make the provincial team.
Mankola said they will be taking into consideration a number of factors during the selection process and that will have a huge impact .
“Again it’s not about numbers, it’s about capability. We have a team of selectors and these selectors come from each club, they will sit after the championships to select the team. So there will be a lot of factors that then determine how big our contingent is going to be,” Mankola said.
They have had several galas building up to this competition and Mankola said there is still room for improvement.
“They can always do better. In any sport, a sportsperson can always do better than their last best, that’s my personal thinking. I mean we have had records broken during the season in the short course especially, but the long course is harder.
“So it just depends on the weather, the condition of athletes, you know the condition of water, the temperature . . . it’s a whole lot of things.
“So you can have a swimmer, swimming in exactly the same event over two days but they post very different results.
“But we encourage them to just do their best, beat their own time,” added Mankola.
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