The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

FELIX Calderon gave the Bahamas Swimming Federation high marks for the staging of the XXI Caribbean Islands Swimming Championships.

The BSF hosted the week long championships three days after completion of their annual Royal Bank of Canada National Swimming Championships at the Betty Kelly Kenning Swim Complex.

“It was excellent. They have a very good organisation,” said Calderon, president of the CCCAN, the organisers of the championships. “It was much bigger than we expected.

“For the CCCAN, we only have 18 countries in the Caribbean, but because this one was a qualifier for the Olympic Games, we had 14 more countries, which brought a lot of quality to the meet.”

Calderon, who hails from Puerto Rico, highly praised BSF president Algernon Cargill for the tremendous job in pulling off the championships, noting that they have a fantastic group of officials, who worked diligently in making the event a success.

With both CARIFTA Games and the Commonwealth Youth Games coming to the Bahamas next year, Calderon said he intends to return to experience another first class event staged by the BSF.

Cargill said while the BSF is basking in the success of winning the CISC title for the first time, he’s singing the praises of the organising committee for going beyond the call of duty to get the job done.

“Our victory is a result of the hard work of our swimmers and our coaches and our organising committee,” Cargill said. “What we were able to do was to have an organising committee that was able to ensure that our visitors and our swimmers got a first-class experience in the Bahamas.

“While we were focusing on doing a great job at the CISC, we know that we have to host the Carifta Games and the Commonwealth youth Games next year. So we told the Bahamas Olympic Committee that they don’t need to worry about swimming because we have 12 qualified officials who are qualified to judge at the Olympic level and we can get the job done, just as we did at CISC.”

John Bradley, the secretary general for the BSF, said it took a helium task behind the scene by a lot of people to pull off the back-to-back nationals and CISC championships.

“It was very tasking, considering that we only had about four months to deal with CISC,” he said. “We were not sure that we were going to deal with it, but when we went into it, it was very taxing.

“We had a group of people who worked very hard and they managed to pull it off. But we have a lot of people who are very exhausted, but we managed to pull it off. So that’s a great thing.”

There were a lot of logistic problems that the BSF were faced with in staging the two events so closely together.

But Bradley said once the Nationals got off the ground, we went right to work on CISC.

“We had a great team to work with and that was why we were so successful,” he said. “We have a lot of people to thank for their efforts, but we won’t start calling names because we don’t want to overlook anybody right now.”

Bradley said with the support of the Bahamas Government, the BSF showed that they are capable of putting on some high level events.

However, he said in going forward, it is their hope they won’t run concurrently, but rather will be spaced out like Carifta and the Commonwealth Youth Games that the BSF has to prepare for next year.