Schoenmaker in a quest to improve
Local swimmer Tatjana Schoenmaker looks ready to be a serious medal candidate at next month's World Student Games in Taipei.
Three seconds. That is how much Tatjana Schoenmaker needs to improve her time in the 200m-breaststroke by if she wants to have a realistic chance of medalling at next year’s Commonwealth Games.
Rocco Meiring, her coach, admits she is in for a tough challenge.
“It equates to finding a way to gain eight metres. The only way Tatjana would be able to do so is if we address every aspect: technique, power, speed endurance and pure speed,” Meiring explained.
The exciting thing is that Schoenmaker, a Tuks/HPC swimmer, is never one to settle for mediocrity. Earlier this season, after swimming 2:24.93 at the national championships, she is on record of having said that with this time she would have made the semi-finals at the Olympics. But she also admitted that she was not even close to the range for the finals.
“There is still a lot of hard work that awaits me. My goals are obviously not only to reach final; I’d like to achieve a lot more,” Schoenmaker said after that championships.
It is a case of first things first. Schoenmaker will be competing at the World Student Games in Taipei next month. The financial science student at the University of Pretoria chose not to represent South Africa at the world championships due to her study commitments.
“I don’t want to miss too much of varsity. I want to focus on my studies as well, but I will compete at the World University Games (in Taipei), which is just outside of my exam times,” Schoenmaker said.
According to Meiring, there is no real goal for the World University Games.
“I will be happy if she competes in the final. The goal was for her to swim a time of 2:24 something at Taipei but she has already done so at the South African championships in Durban, which means we are ahead of the planned schedule. I would be happy with another 2:24 performance at the University Games,” Meiring said.
Schoenmaker’s best time in the 200m-breaststroke is 2:24.93.
Meiring has mapped out Schoenmaker’s ‘journey’ to next year’s Commonwealth Games and the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo to the finest detail, leaving absolutely nothing to chance. He has prioritised her studies.
“Tatjana got the X-factor when it comes to putting in the hard work and competing. To me, she is like a proverbial ‘racehorse’ so as a coach it is important to know when enough is enough. You can never overload her during training because there is always a chance that it will have the opposite effect. It would have been easy if she was a swimmer that you can push hard during training as that allows you as a coach to make mistakes because the volume of training will compensate for it but now it is all about finding the right balance. There is no margin for error. What excites me is the way Tatjana is capable of producing a really big output during certain sessions,” Meiring concluded.
For free breaking and community news, visit Rekord’s websites:
For more news and interesting articles, like Rekord on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or Instagram.
