FOUR young swimmers from Ledbury & District Swimming Club swam at Coventry last weekend in the Midland District Championships.

Patrick Blake, James Middleton, George Bennion and Thomas Stokes competed in the 10-year-old age group and faced the toughest competition they have ever encountered. For George, it was also his first experience at racing in a 50m pool.

The 200m backstroke was the first event, a key event for Thomas Stokes. Swimming long course - only four lengths as opposed to eight of a 25m pool, is particularly difficult on backstroke where it's a problem for the swimmers to assess exactly how many metres they have swum and balance their remaining stamina to cover the rest of the race.

Thomas coped well and was delighted to improve his entry time by three seconds and finish a very creditable 10th out of the 50 competitors. Also in this event were Patrick Blake and James Middleton who did extremely well to qualify as neither of them swim backstroke as their first stroke. Both boys found it hard to pace the distance and although bettering their last long course times, were just outside their pbs.

George Bennion was the only LADASC butterfly swimmer, competing in both the 100m and 200m events. A measure of how tough the qualifying time is was shown by the fact that in both events there were only 11 competitors from a huge district that takes in the City clubs of Birmingham, Coventry, Milton Keynes, Worcester, Cambridge, Derby and Oxford plus all the smaller clubs in between.

The 100m event was on Saturday and although attaining a new pb, the swim did not go smoothly, nerves and panic destroyed the race plan but it proved to be valuable experience and his disappointment was channelled into determination to perform better at the longer distance the following day. This he duly did with a tremendous swim, taking three seconds off his entry time and finishing in seventh place. Boosted with this achievement he went on to compete in the 100m breaststroke and again achieved a new best time and finished 15th out of 31 competitors.

Team mates James Middleton and Thomas Stokes also swam in this event, James was unfortunate to have been distracted at the start, resulting in a rather slow take off which although he worked incredibly hard could not make up the time, finishing half a second slower than his pb. Thomas continued with his recent improvement on this his weakest of all four strokes and was pleased to take a second of his best time finishing in 19th position with James 22nd.

Head coach of LADASC, Viv Jones said: "I'm extremely pleased with the performance of these four boys, they are a credit to the club. We have not had a competitor at these championships for over six years which indicates what an achievement it is just to qualify.

"Swimming at high profile events such as this is very different to our league swims, and long course events are hard as we have no nearby facility in which to practice. It makes for long tiring days for both the swimmer and parents but the experience gained is well worth the effort."