Royal Tunbridge Wells Monson Swimming Club (Monson) brought this year’s Kent County ASA Swimming Championship campaign to a close with a further 6 gold medal performances to add to their already impressive tally at Medway Park, Gillingham last weekend.
Caitlin Fearon (12 years) added her tenth gold medal of the championships in winning the 200m breaststroke by a sizeable margin and securing her age group BAGCAT’s trophy for the second year succession, underlining her domination of the age group in Kent. Caitlin has produced clean sweeps in the breaststroke and medley events and narrowly missed winning all five freestyle events by just 0.04 in one event.
Monson success in breaststroke was endorsed by further gold’s from Emily Das (10 years) and Annabel Guye-Johnson (13 years) who also produced clean sweeps for their age groups across all breaststroke events. Emily Das won her age group by a colossal 16 seconds, established a new Event Best Performance (EPB) by 3 seconds, and eclipsed Annabel’s Monson record by 5 seconds.
Beth Hathaway (17 years) continued her good run winning her age group 50m and 200m Freestyle, the latter in a new EBP. Both performances also earned her silvers in the open championship race and another clean sweep in her age group sprint events. Eve Carless (16 years) also medalled in her age group in the 200m Freestyle taking a well earned bronze. Monson’s other gold of the weekend came from Savanna Jemmett (14 years) in the 50m backstroke to underline her supremacy in winning all of her age group backstroke events.
Callum Ryan finished his most successful Kent’s ever with silver in the 100m Freestyle bringing his personal tally to: 2 gold; 7 silver and 1 bronze. There were also creditable top 6 finishes for: top Simon Newton (13 years) and Thomas Leman (10 years) in the 100m IM and Charlotte Scholes (13 years) 100m Butterfly.
The final day of the championships saw the relay events were Monson also medalled. In the girls 13/14 years Medley Relay the team of Savanna Jemmett, Annabell Guye-Johnson, Charlotte Scholes, and Charlotte Chapman were narrowly beaten for the gold taking a fine silver for Monson. Not to be outdone the boys 13/14 Medley relay of: George Hinton, Anthony Bayley, Simon Newton and Joshua Harrison also made the rostrum taking bronze.
The boys 15/16 year old team of Nick Newton, Joe Stevens, Sam Fenton and Callum Ryan made finals to finish 4th in both the Medley and Freestyle relays as did the girls Junior Teams of Savanna Jemmett, Annabel Guye-Johnson, Charlotte Chapman and Emma Green to finish 6th in both their events.
Director of swimming, Kim Longland was very pleased with Monson’s showing at this year’s Championship and highlighted the performance of the boys and the emerging new talent to supplement the performances of the more seasoned campaigners as an indication of Monson’s continued improvement and reflected by the team points scores.
Monson finished the champions with an impressive tally of: 26 gold; 22 silver and 14 bronze medals and a further 48 top 6 finishes from 136 starts. Eight of the gold medal swims were EPB’s and Monson swimmers swam PB’s in over 80% of their races.
Monson are next in action over Easter at the Portsmouth and Northsea Easter Swim Festival.