Plans are underway for Fiji Swimming to hire a High Performance coach from overseas. This was confirmed to SUNsports yesterday by Fiji Swimming president, Ben Rova during the National Swimming Long Course Championship at the Damodar City Aquatic Centre.

“We have just completed all our documentation and preparation for a High Performance coach and hopefully next week we will be passing that over to the Fiji Sports Commission chairman Peter Mazey,” Rova said.

“Tomorrow (today) we have an executive meeting with the Fiji Swimming board and we will be tabling this to them to highlight our criteria that we have set. Once that is passed at the meeting then everything will be sent. Then our adverts will be sent out and definitely by September we should have this High Performance coach starting.”

The High Performance coach will work hand-in-hand with the elite squad, Under-12 and senior squad that will be chosen after the championship. They will be introduced to the system to prepare for the Pacific Games in 2019 and 2024 and the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.

“Straight after this long course championship we will be selecting our development elite squad, which will comprise of 12 swimmers- six males and six females. These are the guys who are going to take us to the next four to eight year development. So we are going to do specific training for them and we will be sending them to the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) in Canberra in December.

“We are also going to identify our junior squad, which is the 12 years and under. So after this championship we will not only identify those three groups but we also have a senior squad so there will be four of them that will be continuously going through.

“The important one is the development elite and this will be the core swimmers who will form the Fiji team for the 2019 and 2024 Pacific Games and also the 2020 Olympic Games. We will also set up programmes for them and they will compliment the development elite squad that we will be selecting.”

Rova said the three-day championship has been a success with swimmers from the West paving the way in the pool.

“It was a great start from all the nine clubs. We have had some really good stand out performance especially the western clubs who are doing exceptionally well.

“We have had some really good performance from the 10 and unders and this is one of the events where we are actually going by age group.”

The championship ends today.

Edited by Leone Cabenatabua

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