The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

WITH the team now selected, head coach Allan Murray said it’s now time for the coaching staff to fine tune the swimmers before they head off to Martinique at the end of March to go for their third straight CARIFTA Swimming Championships.

Following the final trials over the weekend at the Betty Kelly Kenning Swim Complex, the federation ratified a 36-member swim team and a 10-member open water team that will represent the Bahamas in Fort-de-France March 22-25.

Murray, a former CARIFTA standout before he went on to compete at college and the Olympic Games, said he’s excited about the make-up of the team.

“It’s a talented team,” said Murray, who also serves as the head coach for the Swift Swim Club. “We’re strong in a lot of areas and although we’re weak in a few, we hope to capitalise on those strong areas and that should help us to get through the weak areas.”

The key factor for the team, according to Murray, is for the coaching staff to get the swimmers ready.

“Now that the team has been selected, we are starting to get them pretty focused,” said Murray, who will hold a training session 9am Saturday for the team members who are in New Providence, while one will be done for those in Grand Bahama with coach Andy Loveitt.

“Our coaching staff here in New Providence and in Grand Bahama and Sara Knowles, who is in Abaco, will be trying to get together as often as we can to try and get this team to perform even better. We feel we have a good coaching core and so we will be trying to use our strength to get them to be better prepared for the games.”

It’s no tall order for Team Bahamas to duplicate what they did over the past two games, winning for the first time in Savaneta, Aruba in 2014 and coming back last year to successfully defend the title in Bridgetown, Barbados.

“We know that everybody expects us to perform very well,” Murray said. “Our goal is to go there with that goal in mind, to win the title again. We feel we have the strength and the numbers to do it. So we are going to go there and make sure that we do the best that we can to defend our title.”

Looking at the team, Murray pointed out that the strength will be in the boys’ 13-14 division where they had a large number of competitors to select from. He noted that the girls’ 15-17 division will be returning a number of competitors, who helped the team last year and so he expects them to hold their own. And the boys’ 15-17 should be just as talented with a number of the competitors coming home from boarding school.

“We feel that this team will perform very well in their individual events, but we also expect that our relay teams will also be very strong,” Murray said. “This really reminds me of the times when I competed for CARIFTA. We had some very good teams, but unfortunately we didn’t win when I competed.”

In case you missed it, here are the swimmers selected to Team Bahamas: