Six swimmers from the local Kinsmen Flying Fins club travelled to Winnipeg two weeks ago for the Prairie Winter International high performance swim meet.

There were 440 swimmers from 39 club across Western Canada, Ontario and the United States hitting the pool during the event and Flying Fins swimmers were able to turn some heads with strong performance.

11-year-old Cadence Johns was tops among the locals, bringing home four medals in total.

“She had a fantastic weekend, she brought home four medals — a gold, two silver and a bronze — just missed a provincial record by 6/100 of a second, just missed qualifying for national championships in the 1500 breast, 200 breast, 200 IM and 400 IM,” said head coach Gord Shields, summing up the accomplishments for Johns at the event.

Johns took female swimmer of the meet honours for the local club after improving all her swim times past her personal lifetime best.  

She captured gold in the 100-metre individual medley with a time of 1:13.01.  Her time in the 400m IM put her in second, but was 19.36 seconds faster than her lifetime best.

“She’s committed, she comes to the pool, she trains hard every day and is focused.  She does the work and does what needs to be done,” said Shields.  

Shields is confident that Johns will qualify for the national championships in a number of different events over the course of the season after just missing on the weekend.

Elyssa Tacchi was the first local swimmer to qualify for the National Age Group Championship.  She accomplished the feat while winning bronze in the 200m breaststroke.

Shields said the 12-year-old has worked hard to get to that point.

“She’s our first national level swimmer to progress to the next level, so that was super exciting and she had a great race in Winnipeg,” said Shields.

Austin Lin also brought home a bronze medal in the 50m backstroke, while posting a number of top-8 finishes during his swims.  Joey Derksen had a fourth place finish in the 200m butterfly and three other top-16 finishes.

Emma Moore and Rainer Olson competed at their first high performance meet in Winnipeg and Shields said both put together strong showings.

“It can be pretty intimidating when you go to a meet like this where you have some of the best swimmers in Canada,” said Shields.  “To first perform at this meet and post personal best times is an excellent result and both of them did well, Rainer had all personal best times, while Emma had three out of four.

“It was a learning experience for them for sure.  To go to a high level meet and see what the competition is like outside of Saskatchewan.”

The local swimmers will now have a break over the holidays and then they’re back in the pool to begin getting ready for the next meets for February.