The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

WITH the Bahamas Swimming Federation getting ready to host the 2017 CARIFTA Swimming Championships, president Algernon Cargill said they are confident they will field the best team to regain the title over the Easter holiday weekend.

While CARIFTA is scheduled for April 15, Cargill said the BSF would select its 36-member team on Sunday following the final trials scheduled to start 6pm Friday and 9am Saturday at the Betty Kelly-Kenning National Swim Complex.

“Our goal is to win CARIFTA at home and we will select our swim team as well as open water swimming and water polo teams,” Cargill said. “Our goal is to win swimming and open water swimming, so our swimmers are focused on that.

“The trials this weekend will be very competitive, especially the boys’ and girls’ 15-and-over divisions. They will be our most competitive divisions.”

After winning the title for two consecutive years in 2014-15, the Bahamas lost out to Guadeloupe last year in Martinique, but Cargill said they are working hard on keeping the title here at home.

“CARIFTA is a preparatory meet for us for the Youth Commonwealth Games when we hope to field a strong team for that also,” said Cargill of the games that will also be hosted here in July by the Bahamas Olympic Committee.

“CARIFTA is obviously a lot of work with a lot of volunteers involved, but we have Youth Commonwealth and CCCAN as the age group meets that we are participating in, so we definitely want to do well in all of them.”

With the performances turned in so far from the swimmers in the various meets leading up to the trials, Cargill said they should only have a team of competitors who would have made the qualifying standards.

“We should have no difficulties filling the team with only qualifiers this weekend,” he said. “The team will be announced Sunday night and we are looking forward to that progress.”

Twenty five teams have already confirmed their participation in the CARIFTA Games. They include the following:

Antigua & Barbuda, Aruba, Barbados, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Curacao, Dominica, French Guyana, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Netherland Antilles, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Maarten, St Martin, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Surinam, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos and the US Virgin Islands.

This will mark the fourth time that the Bahamas has hosted CARIFTA, which was held for the first time in Kingston, Jamaica in 1999. It first came to the Bahamas in 2001 and returned in 2004 and 2012.

During the Barracuda Swim Club’s Atlantic Medical Invitational over the weekend (see results on page 4), in at least 35 events, swimmers attained the qualifying standards for CARIFTA, which left coach Travano McPhee predicting that the trials will be very competitive this weekend. The swim club also hosted an 11-member team from the Turks and Caicos Islands, who made their maiden international voyage as they look to qualify for CARIFTA for the first time.