Shawn Pouchet, Pres­i­dent of the Aquat­ics Sports As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (ASATT), says they will be en­gag­ing di­rect­ly with the swim­mers who were part of the Carif­ta Aquat­ics team to see what can help to help them de­vel­op fur­ther.

Pocuhet was speak­ing on the 31-mem­ber team’s ar­rival from the just-con­clud­ed 39th Carif­ta Aquat­ics Cham­pi­onships, which end­ed at the Pierre Samot Com­mu­ni­ty Aquat­ic Cen­tre, Le Lamentin, Mar­tinique, on Tues­day night, where the T&T swim­mers un­der the su­per­vi­sion of head coach Deron ‘Rocky’ Sam­lals­ingh and his tech­ni­cal staff placed third with 59 medals, which con­sist­ed of 20 gold, 19 sil­ver and 20 bronze medals, while tal­ly­ing 754.5 points.

An elat­ed Pouchet, speak­ing at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port on Thurs­day, said, “We saw some break­through per­for­mances from younger swim­mers, first-time and sec­ond-time per­form­ers. The growth from last year to this year – it was in­cred­i­ble to see the same ath­letes, you know, grow with­in that one-year pe­ri­od.

“Our old­er ath­letes are rep­re­sent­ing well, show­ing, and lead­ing from the front. Our 15-17s and our 13-14s who are sea­soned – you all have re­al­ly led the way for in­spir­ing not on­ly your team­mates but I think the rest of the swim­ming fra­ter­ni­ty and the rest of your com­pa­tri­ots around the lo­cal are­na. All right, so take a round of ap­plause be­cause I think you al­ready de­serve it.

To the man­age­ment team and me, it will be re­miss of me not to men­tion them. I think from great lead­er­ship, and I think that we have, from the ex­ec­u­tive lev­el, learnt a lot more than we would have had in pre­vi­ous years from their lead­er­ship be­cause we have been open lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, try­ing to work things out, try­ing to put things in place so that we have a blue­print go­ing for­ward.

Mov­ing for­ward, Pouchet said, the ASATT ex­ec­u­tive will en­gage the ath­letes, and that’s one of the things they are go­ing to do dif­fer­ent­ly.

“Many times we do post-mortems on these com­pe­ti­tions, talk­ing about what went right and what went wrong, but we’ll talk to the coach­es, and we’ll talk to the man­age­ment team, but we want to now talk to you guys to find out be­cause we un­der­stand this as a mile­stone.

“This is not the be all and end all. CARIF­TA doesn’t de­fine you as a per­son or de­fine you as a swim­mer, so for us, we re­al­ly want to fig­ure out what will im­prove and en­hance your ex­pe­ri­ence as an ath­lete, not just a na­tion­al ath­lete as a swim­mer. All right, and how we can make things bet­ter from a 360 ap­proach is what we’ve been look­ing at. So once we get our feed­back from you guys, I promise you through the Ath­letes Com­mis­sion we will im­ple­ment it in­to our plans go­ing for­ward.’

Sam­lals­ingh, re­flect­ing on the team’s over­all per­for­mance said that as a coach­ing unit they could not have asked for more of these swim­mers. We did up an ini­tial mock point sys­tem, a pre­dic­tor based on the psych sheet, where we would be and how we would play and how many points we would be, and we broke it up day by day, and each day we tried to amass more points than pre­dict­ed.”

He added, “We were sched­uled to get 699 points, Ba­hamas was sched­uled to get 853, and Ja­maica 791. So, we were be­hind sec­ond place by 100 and be­hind first place by 154.”

“And at the end of the meet to see where we were placed, we were sup­posed to have 799 points; we end­ed up with 747. It showed the per­for­mances placed by ath­letes, and when you look at the times ath­letes were able to do amidst the weak­ness­es and the tri­als we had, the dif­fi­cul­ties, to see what these ath­letes were able to bring out, it was tru­ly amaz­ing. By drop­ping three or four sec­onds in 200 and two sec­onds in 100, it was ex­cep­tion­al, and their per­for­mances, we have no com­plaints about it,” boast­ed Sam­lals­ingh, a for­mer na­tion­al swim­mer.

With teams al­lowed a con­tin­gent of 36 swim­mers, T&T was on­ly able to name a 31-mem­ber team, and Sam­lals­ingh was quick to note that this could have helped the team in their quest to bring home the ti­tle, the first since their last tri­umph in 2010 in Kingston, Ja­maica.

He ex­plained, “Our area of weak­ness would have been the short­age of mem­bers. So, we went with a 31-mem­ber team, while the rules al­low us 36 mem­bers.

“And while we could say that they weren’t oth­er qual­i­fiers, hav­ing a full team al­lows you cer­tain ad­van­tages.

“For ex­am­ple, we didn’t have any 15 - 17 girls’ re­lay teams, and at the Carif­ta Games, the 15 - 17 girls’ re­lay team on­ly had sev­en teams.

“So, worst case, each re­lay we took part in, even if we came eighth, we’d have been award­ed two points by four re­lays, which is eight points.”

“That in it­self would have giv­en us the abil­i­ty to come sec­ond, be­cause we lost by 7.5 points. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, for the flight we took to go up in the morn­ing, ath­letes had to reach the air­port by half past two, and the ath­letes were tired all through the meet.”

“They com­plained about it from the first day; the sec­ond day, they were just sleep-de­prived, and this ham­pered per­for­mance great­ly.”

“In ad­di­tion to not hav­ing a masseuse or some­body who could help aid in re­cov­ery.

Mov­ing for­ward, Sam­lals­ingh said he would like to see T&T im­ple­ment a larg­er squad of swim­mers from ear­li­er.

“So what­ev­er the cri­te­ria may be, we im­ple­ment a group of per­sons that we want to start train­ing from as ear­ly as the end of this month and put per­sons in a kind of train­ing camp where it is catered to­wards Carif­ta Aquat­ics 2027.

“Like-mind­ed swim­mers train­ing to­geth­er with the com­mon goal of Carif­ta 2027 be­ing at their peak.

Sam­lals­ingh al­so said he be­lieved there was a need to come to­geth­er as a coach­ing com­mu­ni­ty and put their heads to­geth­er to find what is lack­ing be­cause there are ar­eas where they could see the weak­ness­es.

“The longer races: we had one per­son in one of the races and two, one male and one fe­male, so we’re giv­ing away points and 200m but­ter­fly.

Sam­lals­ingh again called for coach­es to keep their part by com­ing to­geth­er as a com­mu­ni­ty and help­ing pro­duce more tal­ent, as some key swim­mers of the team, in­clu­sive of USA-based Liam Car­ring­ton, who won nine medals, in­clu­sive of eight gold (six of which were in­di­vid­ual), may not be around next year.

“We have seen that we have con­tin­u­ous­ly closed the gap, and I think one of our star per­form­ers will no longer be with us from next year, and we need to take the lead and cre­ate some new star per­form­ers who will fit the bill.