WBHS wins KZN top boys’ school gala for seventh consecutive year

KWAZULU-Natal’s top boys’ schools gathered at Kings Park Swimming Pool last week to decide which school would become the 2014 KZN champions.

WBHS, as the current holders and having won it six years in a row, were certainly the odds on favourites to win the title again. Galas earlier in the season had however shown that the national swimming champions were not going to have it all their own way.

Certain KZN schools have upped their game in the last year encouraged no doubt by WBHS’s Chad Le Clos and his achievements at the London Olympics.

Glenwood have certainly been hard at work recruiting and training swimmers in a bid to topple the South African champions.

Another school that has quietly got on with business of developing its aquatics is Clifton College which has a number of fine swimmers.

The gala started with the U14 freestyle relay which was won by Glenwood and which must have sent alarm bells ringing in the WBHS’s camp. The reigning champions then settled down to win the other four age group freestyle relays with Glenwood, Clifton and Hilton fighting it out for second places.

Glenwood showed their growing strength in the breaststroke events winning two with WBHS winning three but coming horribly unstuck in the U15 race, where they finished way off the leaders.

It was business as usual in the backstroke and butterfly races for WBHS where they showed that they were still the masters of these swimming strokes. WBHS almost had a clean sweep in the medley relays but were piped by Clifton in the U17 event.

Westville capped off another successful championship gala by winning the final event as well, the freestyle ladder relay. Clifton College finished consistently in the top four in each race the entire evening and therefore deserved their second placing overall.

The only age group to win all their events on the evening was the WBHS U19 group, spearheaded by Daniel Ronaldson, a recent silver medallist at the Five Nations International Swimming Championships in Australia.

A disqualification in the backstroke cost the WBHS a clean sweep in the U16 age group. The number of disqualifications incurred by the different schools possibly affected the final school placings and knocked out some of the exciting competition between the schools, which was a pity.

The final placings were WBHS 191 points, Clifton 160, Glenwood 128, Kearsney 117, Hilton 113, College 97, DHS 62 and Northwood 50 points.