Over two weekends in February, the annual Northumberland and Durham Swimming Championships took place at the impressive Sunderland Aquatic Centre’s 50m pool. All the clubs in the Tyne Tees area sent in their qualifying swimmers to compete for this year’s titles over six age groups.
Four swimmers from Newton Aycliffe’s Sedgefield 75 swimming club managed to post the needed qualifying times: Alex Boyer, Filip Wilczynski, Emma Price and Evie Weston.
The competition started on Friday night, Evie went first in 800m freestyle and clocked a massive 19 seconds PB in an excellent swim and set the tone for the competition. Emma followed in the 800m freestyle with a 2 second PB, winning gold. Alex then swam the mammoth 1500m freestyle, finishing just out of the medals in 4th.
Next morning saw Emma back in action in 200m freestyle, qualifying fastest for the final and then winning gold, her third 200m freestyle title in a row. Alex was then in the pool winning bronze in 800m freestyle, beating his PB for that event by over 18 seconds.
400m IM followed in the afternoon for Emma and another gold medal.
Sunday morning and Alex swam 200m freestyle, narrowly missing out on the final before Filip qualified fastest for the 50m backstroke final where he took gold and his first county title.
In the afternoon, Filip was at it again over 100m backstroke – fastest in qualifying and fastest in the final and a second gold medal. Emma then swam 2 PBs, taking bronze for 50m freestyle.
Two weeks later Emma kicked off with 100m freestyle consecutive PB’s for her 4th gold medal. Alex then swam 400m freestyle and kept up his good performances with 7 seconds taken off his PB and a 7th placed finish.
Filip beat his PB in the heat and again in the final of the 200m IM taking the bronze. In the same session, Filip again set PB’s twice as he took another bronze in 50m butterfly. Emma then swam 100m butterfly and set a PB in the heat and finished 5th in the final.
On to the final day and Filip qualified second fastest for the 200m backstroke final and maintained that position in the final, taking silver. Emma then claimed her 5th gold of the championships as she won 400m freestyle gold by 4 seconds.
In the last session, Emma swam a good PB in the 200 IM final and took the silver. Filip was the last to swim and beat PB in the 100m butterfly finishing fourth.
A final tally of 32 swims brought 16 PB’s, 7 gold, 2 silver and 4 bronze medals. This placed Sedgefield 10th in the medal table out of 32 competing clubs despite being one of the smallest clubs in the north east, beating numerous clubs who are huge in comparison.