SWA swim team granted new starting blocks
By Mark Schadenberg
TILLSONBURG – Good news for Oxford County athletics.
When I was sports editor of The Woodstock Sentinel-Review throughout most of the 1990’s there were two names synonymous with the Southside Aquatics Centre pool (pictured) – Piranhas of Woodstock (POW) and its coach Joni Marten-Sanders.
POW was an impact – winning Aqua-Seven league titles year after year, and many of those banners are still hanging inside the pool. Woodstock was developing high-calibre swimmers too, including Brad Vanderkam and Brad Sales.
Vanderkam would win gold medals representing a London club at the 2001 Canada Summer Games, would set an OUA record in the 100m butterfly while at Western, win CIS gold in 2004, and later compete at the NCAA level at UNLV (Las Vegas).
Sales is a member of the Woodstock Sports Wall of Fame for his accomplishments in the World Paralympics, winning gold in Australia in 2000. Sales, who was born without a left leg below his knee, also competed in Athens, Greece at the Paralympics in 2004, and has owned many Canadian records at the ability level of S9.
Somewhere between 1995 and 2013, the shift away from competitive swimming occurred in Woodstock somehow. Today, the top local swimmers train out of both Woodstock and Tillsonburg on a team called South Western Aquatics (SWA).
The Tillsonburg swim team (its pool) recently received $35,000 from an Ontario Trillium Foundation funding grant. The SWA would have had to apply for the dollars along with the Tillsonburg Kinsmen pool folks, but their solid proposal was a request for both new starting blocks and an accessible lift.
SWA president Liam McCreery is extremely pleased with the pool’s improvements, saying in a Tillsonburg News newspaper story: "This is the best facility in Oxford County, this investment upgrades it so we can have proper training and competitive meets."
"This is an excellent investment in swimming," he added, "but also our kids."
With Woodstock planning to possibly build a new pool to replace the outdoor Lions Pool at the proposed Woodall Farm multi-use recreation complex, maybe, just maybe, part of that concentration should be on an indoor pool with six lanes long enough for Woodstock to again host competitive meets. The facility would most certainly need large enough staging and viewing areas, and ample dressing rooms, plus quick access to concession stands, to attract significant regional meets.
As for Marten-Sanders, she is most certainly still coaching, but at the Wilmot complex near New Hamburg and a squad aptly named the Wilmot Aquatic Aces.
LINKS:
Mark Schadenberg, Sales Representative
Royal LePage Triland Realty
(519) 537-1553, cell or text
Email: mschadenberg@rogers.com
Twitter: markroyallepage
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