Marlins are Sussex champions!

Saturday 25th June, round three of the Sussex League. With our A team racing at home at the Triangle in the Divison 1 League final (Marlins, Crawley, Atlantis) and our B team racing up at K2 the stage was for a momentous evening.

As with the two previous rounds our A team led from the start of the gala with some very fast early swims from the team. It was a whole team effort through the evening with the swimmers fighting for those pb’s and places and many younger swimmers racing up to help the team. The A team held on to the lead all the way up to event 50 of 57 when the announcement came that we had dropped to second place for the first time in this year’s league in any round. Crawley had managed to gain some points back on us through some fast racing and some Marlins disqualifications and had a 1 point lead. The Marlins swimmers reacted brilliantly standing up and racing fantastically for the remaining seven events winning 6 out of the 7 including the squadron relay which meant MARLINS secured a 25 point win over 2nd place finishers Crawley and a 59 point margin over Atlantis who also raced well over the evening.

The swimmers waited tentatively on the edge of the poolside for the announcement and on hearing the confirmed result that Marlins had been crowned champions of Sussex for the first time roared and made a giant leap back into the pool to celebrate. The achievement by swimmers, coaches and volunteers is momentous, only 3 clubs had won the league up until now, since it started in 1996 (Hastings, Crawley, Brighton). Marlins become the 4th club to win the title and can be extra pleased with the results along the way in this year’s league having beaten all 6 top teams out of the 9 in Division 1. In 2014 Marlins placed 5th in the league so we really have come a long way over the past two seasons.

We can now look forward to building on this through the club to make sure our swimmers experience this again in the coming years, it meant so much to them to achieve this and we plan to keep it going! Our B team who raced extremely well in all three rounds now earn the right to compete officially in Division 2 next year. This enables more of the swimmers to race for the club and to excel as part of the Marlins team.

Congratulations all, lets go MARLINS

Sussex Champions 2016!