Thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate the past 12 months of results at the 2019 Swimming Waikato Awards Night.
We would like to thank Alison Fitch, Natasha Budd, Cherie McCleery for all their hard work behind the scenes, Darren Mill’s for MC’íng the evening, & AGORA for hosting catering the event.
We would like to acknowledge our gratitude to our sponsors and supporters, it was great to see so many of you on the night.
This year our theme was #wearewaikato , a celebration of everyone involved in making swimming in the Waikato what it is and what it aspires to be in the future.
Swimming Waikato would like to thank our army of volunteers for their hard work and commitment in supporting swimming at grassroots and performance levels, your support makes all the difference.
We have had a challenging year with the sad passing of Ken Nixon, a hugely influential and well-respected Coach. We would like to acknowledge and offer our gratitude for the very moving speech given by former Fairfield Swimming Club President, Neil Shirreffs in honour of Ken.
Neil gave comment in his talk on the overwhelming support the Fairfield Club received from the Waikato Clubs, Coaches and Volunteers. Our Clubs will always go toe to toe in the pool as expected but we are a family of clubs and will continue to stand alone together!
We have also had many reasons to be proud of ourselves over the last 12 months, a very small handful of these highlights are below:
- 1/3 of the 2018 World Short Course Championships Team currently training or hailing from the Waikato
- 41 Waikato Records broken in 5 days at National Short Course
- 18 individual athletes representing New Zealand
- 5 individual Coach representations on New Zealand Squads
- Successful Queensland Championships 2018 – 48 Personal Bests
- Two clubs in the Top 3 at NZ Open Water (St Peter’s 1st, St Paul’s 3rd)
- 420 Swimmers at 2018 Christmas Meet
- 280 Swimmers at our newly added Hit Out Meet
- 84 Swimmer qualified for the Regional Squads Programme
We are excited for what the next 12 months will hold for our region and the Swimming Waikato Hub, we look forward to building an exciting and successful future alongside our swimming family.
#wearewaikato