Swim Canada's Swim Again Challenge is over for the year and quite a few members of the Kinsmen Flying Fins had a great six weeks.

The program allowed the swimmers to compete with others across Canada without leaving the comfort of their own hometown pool. Flying fins head coach Gord Shields said the swimmers enjoyed having the goals.

“It’s just a great incentive for the swimmers to be involved in doing something like this, to race once a week, and have those results sent into Swim Canada, and have their ranked nationally,” he said. “We had some great results.

Shields said that overall, they had three in the top 50 in the course of their six events, 12 in the top 100 and 41 in the top 200.

In the final week, which was the 100 metre IM, Emily Lin in 11 and 12 was able to place 18th in the country by age, while Chloe Johns was 58th in ages 13 and 14. Cole Hrechka was 27th in 10 and under and Molly Mack was 37th in that age group.

Last week, Lin was 22nd in the 200 m kick, while Hrechka was 81st.

Swimmers got prizes at the club and Shields said they were excited to get to the pool every week.

“The monthly time trials and the Swim Again Challenge along with regular protocol testing does give the swimmers some motivation and a method of monitoring improvement and to challenge them to beat their previous time,” Shields said.

Shields has been able to try to make the practices unique for each of them.

“Every practice has a set specifically designed to challenge them,” Shields said.

One example he pointed out is to use interval training and for the swimmers to hold a consistent pace based on their personal best time. “It can be a percentage off best time, or best time plus so many seconds, depending on the distance and set design,” he said. “That way each set has a specific goal for each swimmer, based on their own time so makes it individual, yet they are doing the set together.”

The swimming community is still looking at next spring for the time to do some high performance meets. The Manitoba-Saskatchewan competition is still a long wa off but it is a goal, as are the Olympic trials.