A ten-strong squad has been announced to represent Great Britain at the 21st LEN European Junior Synchronised Swimming Championships which is set to take place in Gloucester in just under a month’s time.
The top 16 junior athletes from the national figures event were invited to take part in a camp at the High Performance Centre in Aldershot to face further selection as the team staff chose the final ten athletes that will compete for international honours in Gloucester.
The Junior squad will be supported by the new Head Coach, Olympic gold medallist Nathalie Bartleson, Assistant Coach Kate Coupar and Development Coach Alex Marchant.
American-born Bartleson, who took up her position with British Synchro at the beginning of March, has previously worked as Olympic Duet Coach for the 2004 Dutch Olympic team and has four years experience as Head Age Group Coach for a number of American clubs.
The final ten athletes include Rushmoor’s Cherry Wilson, Reading Royal’s Katie Clark and Bristol Central’s Anya Tarasiuk, who have been working on the junior duet for the past six months and competed in December at the Inter-American competition in Athens. The junior team are now taking part in a five-week training camp alongside the British senior squad in Aldershot.
On her selection Tarasiuk said: “I am very pleased to have been selected and I am excited about the competition. The camp we had was quite good and we all had an opportunity to try out in lots of different places. They were testing us on all the different skills you need for synchro and that was good because it kept us focused.
“They told us who had been selected on the third day of the camp and we were told individual but in alphabetical order so I was one of the first to find out. When we went back to the group we all kept straight faces because we wanted it to be a surprise.
“We now have a strong team of ten athletes. Everyone is really good at what they do and we all work together really well because we seemed to bond almost instantly as a team.
On working with Bartleson, Tarasiuk said: “It is amazing to be working with Nathalie. She is unlike any other coach I have worked with. She has lots of different views on things for example if I am struggling with a figure she will have a chat with me and will be able to explain how to perform it in a different way and it makes sense to me.
“She is brilliant to work with as she trains us by listening to our needs and we have a real input into our training which I really like.”
Cherry Wilson is also excited at the prospect of working with an Olympic champion and hopes that the team will perform well in Gloucester.
“It is really good to be on the squad,” Wilson said. “I have been working as part of the junior duet and training full-time since October so I really wanted to be named on the final squad.
“The training has been really hard but the end result is really going to be worth it. The full-time training I have been doing has really helped me with the camp.
“Nathalie is really cool and enthusiastic and really understands our needs. If she knows that something is harder then she eases us into the training. After the final team was selected, we have been working on a five week intensive camp and we have been working alongside the national team, which is great because we get to see how advanced they are and we can learn from their Olympic experience.”
