The Tribune

By RENALDO DORSETT

Sports Reporter

rdorsett@tribunemedia.net

A BUSY season for the Bahamas’ top junior swimmers continues this week at the 2016 Junior Pan Pacific Swimming Championships.

The Bahamas has fielded a six-member team for the event which concludes on August 27 in Maui, Hawaii.

Several athletes qualified for the B final in their respective events last night. However, results were unavailable up to press time last night.

Jared Fitzgerald was the last of 16 qualifiers in the men’s 100m Free and reached the B final in 52.13 seconds.

In the women’s 100m Breast, Lily Higgs qualified 13th in 1:13.08, while Margaret Higgs qualified 15th in 1:13.79.

Other athletes in competition yesterday included N’Nhyn Fernander, who finished 33rd in the 100m Free in 53.01 and Gershwin Greene who was 37th in the same field in 53.41.

In the men’s 100m Breast, Izaak Bastian finished 21st in 1:05.86, but unfortunately, Greene was disqualified.

On day one, Lily Higgs finished 42nd in the 200m Free in 2:12.12, while Fitzgerald finished 26th in the men’s event in 1:59.10.

Fernander finished just outside B qualification in the 100m Back, 18th in 1:01.88.

Fernander and Bastian will be the only competitors for the Bahamas today as they compete in the 100m Fly.

A total of 12 nations are competing in the Junior Pan Pacific Swimming Championships, hosted at the Kihei Aquatic Center. The event includes approximately 225 18-and-under swimmers from Pacific Rim nations, including the United States, Australia, Japan and China. 

“We were invited to participate and I am optimistic that they will all swim well even though the field is challenging,” said Algernon Cargill, president of the BSF. “They have been training all year for this meet. What this does also is that it serves as great preparation for CARIFTA. This is a chance for them to experience real high-level swimming and I expect it to serve as a springboard for all of them moving forward. All of them are going back to their respective schools following this meet and it’s good that they have another chance to compete together.”

The Senior Pan Pacific Swimming Championships was first held in 1985. The meet was initially staged biennially to allow for an international championship-level meet in the non-Olympic and non-World Championship years.

The meet was founded as an alternative to the European Championships for those countries that could not swim in those championships. The meet is considered to be one of the toughest international swimming competitions outside the Olympic Games, World Championships and European Championships.

That tradition has carried over to the junior version of the Pan Pacifics, which ranks it behind its respective junior counterparts such as the Junior Worlds and Olympics.