Confident Jamaica dive into action at Carifta Swimming Championships today
The Carifta swim team will dive into action today with Britney Williams and Naomi Eaton in the girls’ 800m freestyle.
The boys’ section will be contested by Daniel Mair.
The team went through a good familiarisation session at Barbados National Aquatic Centre yesterday morning with most of the home coaches participating in the session.
The familiarisation session was led by Gillian Millwood and as the swimmers did before departure they did some fine tuning of the starts and turns which are critical areas of the entire race game which sometimes gets overlooked.
Today’s morning session will also have the preliminaries of the 200m breaststroke, 50m backstroke, 100m butterfly and the 4x100m freestyle relay.
The session will feature Jamaica prominently, and from the looks of the line-ups, Jamaica will have good chances of getting to the finals set for the afternoon session.
Featured high in the rankings are 11-12 female Kokolo Foster, in the 200m breaststroke seeded at number two. In the 50m backstroke Jamaica have Giani Francis (11-12) seeded number one and Leanna Wainwright seeded at number five.
Nelson Denny (11-12 boys) is seeded at number three and his teammate Brady MacPherson Lewison seeded at number five. Nathaniel Thomas (13-14) is seeded number one for the event with Brianna Anderson (15-17) seeded at number three.
The butterfly also looks good for Jamaica in that Francis is ranked at number two and Saidah Brown sixth for the 11-12 girls. Thirteen to fourteen girls’ seeding shows Sabrina Lyn at the top and Zaneta “Mariposa” Alvaranga at number two. Thomas also ranked number one on the 13-14 boys’ side.
Emily MacDonald is ranked at number two for the girls and Nicholas Vale on the boys’ side ranked at number three in the 15-17 age group.
All relay teams with the exception of the 13-14 boys will get an automatic finals slot, while the 13-14 team will have to swim for a spot in the final ranked at number six.
Thirty swimmers departed the island over the last few days to represent the country in Competitive and Open Water Swimming at the Carifta Swimming Championships in Barbados. Swimming will be contested from today through to next Tuesday with Open Water on next Wednesday.
