The Royal Navy Masters’ Open Meet, Sunday 27 February 2022
Over 20 swimmers from across Out to Swim joined together to swim and fly the flag for inclusive aquatics at the the 19th Royal Navy Open Masters Meet. It is only the second time that we’ve swum at the event, the first time was before the pandemic with just 7 plucky Out to Swim West pioneers. This time, our meet captain Michael S set the ambition for swimmers from across the club to take part, and Out to Swim West welcomed members from London with open arms in true OTS tradition.
It quickly became a focus event for many of our swimmers and coaches and, thanks to our lead OTSW coach Jenny, the whole club have been helping us prepare for our first 2022 competitive swim. There have been opportunities for structured pre-swim warm-ups, improving technique, timed swims and block starts, turns and finishes. This led to a great training session the Saturday beforehand when we opened our doors to Andy, Steph and Daniel, and together we were able to walk through competition day and support each other through peer coaching.
What made the preparation and event was the support we got from our OTS family. OTSW members Rob and Tom threw open the doors to their home for a pasta party the night before and fuelled our effort.
Poolside, coach Jenny helped swimmers - some who were new to competitions or needed reminding - with much needed morale. We saw the best in OTS who cheered and congratulated each other. We were joined in the stands by our OTS family (Rob, Dan and Adam) as well as our actual families and their homemade posters (of Nina, Matt and Al) and, as usual, most of our energy came from poolside baking with ‘star baker’ mentions to Michael N and Michael S’s niece.
The swims in the 8 lane, 25m competition pool felt, for the most part, good. We were keen to celebrate success, support swimmers who didn’t achieve what they wanted (in part thanks to a very keen judge!), and help each other to pace across a long day of aquatics. Jenny reminded us all that, what was most important, was to have learnt something about ourselves and to keep swimming.
We had huge success. OTS came 5th place out of 80 teams. There were many personal achievements across the group and we are very proud of Andrew and Nina who were both top in their age groups. In addition to many other medals, our men’s freestyle A team got gold in their age group.
We are proud of each other and are hope to join the Navy again in 2023. Our team captain Michael left us with this
“‘You should all be really proud of yourselves. It’s not easy swimming in front of so many people, but PBs were smashed all over the place and most importantly lots of cake was eaten’.”