Haileybury Waterlions teenager Ally Woodlock, pictured during last year’s Australian Age Championships, made her first open final at last week’s Australian Swimming Championships in Sydney.By Marc McGowan
HAILEYBURY Waterlions backstroker Ally Woodlock joined club star Kelly Stubbins as a finalist at last week’s Australian Swimming Championships in Sydney.
Woodlock, 17, slashed almost one-and-a-half seconds off her best time in her 200m backstroke heat to snatch the last spot in the final with an impressive 2:17.15 swim.
She went just over half-a-second slower in finishing eighth in the final.
The performance was even more impressive considering Woodlock carried a sore right knee into the meet.
Waterlions coach Wayne Lawes was delighted for his teenage charge.
“Al’s a pretty good competitor, she’d been training really well and up there anything can happen,” he said.
“It was great she made that final and you just can’t replace that sort of experience, especially with the TV and cameras and everything around you.
“It lifts her to another level and she really enjoys that and she walks away with a real lot of confidence from it.”
Lawes points to Woodlock’s bronze medal in the 200m backstroke at the 2008 Australian Age Championships as the impetus for the weekend effort.
Woodlock will try to better her bronze when she competes in this year’s Australian Age Championships from 13 to 18 April in Sydney.
Stubbins, 24, missed world championship selection in her pet event, the 200m freestyle, by an agonising two hundredths of a second on day two of the national competition.
But her time of 1:58.73 was a new Victorian record and she carried the momentum of that swim throughout the week.
Stubbins recorded further personal bests in reaching the finals of the 50m and 100m freestyle, while she also came 13th in the 50m backstroke.
She was back in the club’s Keysborough pool for a light training session on Tuesday morning.
Lawes praised Stubbins’ resilience and believes a change of luck is not far away.
“Kel is going in the right direction and she’s still improving,” he said.
“The big thing it gave her is she now knows she has more speed than she thought and she just let herself go and that’s the thing I’ve been trying to get her to realise.”
Haileybury’s third national championships competitor, Jack Hutchins, 17, experienced the highs and lows of elite swimming at the meet.
The AIS/AFL Academy graduate beat his best 50m freestyle time by two tenths of a second, but had to swim with a hole in one of the legs of his racing suit as he finished 53rd overall.
“The PB was huge, but he actually ripped the suit putting it on … he was beside himself,” Lawes said.
“That was just a nightmare for him and you could see he was a bit stressed because it happened just before he went out.”
Meanwhile, the Waterlions’ up-and-coming stars competed in the Metro All-Junior finals at MSAC on the weekend.
Eleven-year-olds Ben Hewitt (silver) and Noah Pabst (bronze), 12-year-olds George White (gold), Jesse Curtain (bronze), Samantha Molloy (bronze) and Fraser Smith (bronze) and 13-year-olds Zoe Reed (bronze) and Kirsten Roode (bronze) medalled.
