The City of Sheffield swim squad is one of the teams competing at the Ponds Forge International Sports Centre over the weekend for the National Winter Swim Championships.
It is the largest swimming meet in the country for the winter season, with around 1,500 junior and senior swimmers travelling from all over the country to compete.
The squad, known as Team Steel, is a highly regarded competitive swimming team, ranking top in South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire.
Coach Dan Cocking has high hopes for his 32-strong squad, with this weekend being an important opportunity to mark progress and set targets for the more important summer competitions. The British Masters Championships, scheduled for June – also taking place at Ponds Forge – determines whether the juniors will be selected for the youth Olympics and the European championships. For the seniors, it will determine world championship selection.
He said: “Ahead for June, we want to see our athletes’ enforcing changes in-between their races today and throughout this championship.
“For the ones going through to tonight’s finals, we want to see swimmers make adaptations from their heat race, technically and tactically… especially for our older guys, we want them to be in contention for the medals.
“Ultimately, we want to create Olympians and Olympic champions.”
Issey-May Reeves, a Team Steel squad swimmer, competed on Friday. She said: “I did 50m backstroke. I got a PB with 28.86 seconds, but I didn’t get through. The final 10th place qualifying spot did 28.77 seconds. It’s really close.
“You’ve got to prepare yourself for that though, you’ve got to come back from it the next day and try again. I have my 200m backstroke on Saturday and my 100m backstroke on Sunday, they’re my best events. I’ve done everything I can in training so it will be good to see how much I can take off my time.”
Live streams of each race taking place this weekend can be found on Swim England’s YouTube channel.
