PHILIPPINE Swimming Inc. (PSI) president Lailani Velasco is grateful to have held the Swimming National Selection meet last month despite the hurdles they had to overcome.
“To be honest, there were plenty of hurdles that we needed to overcome,” said the sports executive. “I have to admit that at some point, we doubted it would even happen. But we’ve worked hard for this since early this year and we did not want to let our community down.
“This was really for our members and for the entire country. We wanted to show the country that we can recover from this pandemic through sports through swimming,” she continued.
The meet was a collaborative effort of several agencies, and Velasco hopes and knows that this was just the beginning of many things.
“We are definitely relieved that we were able to pull this off and we are, in fact, excited to organize more events in the future,” she expressed. “Of course, we have to thank the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases, Philippine Sports Commission, Bases Conversion and Development Authority and Clark Development Corp. for working with us from the beginning in making this event happen.”
The long-time swimming body leader was not expecting too much from the swimmers in terms of performance in the selection meet as it was the first meet in over two years for all the swimmers who entered the competition.
“We have to manage our expectations given that our swimmers had to abide by all the quarantine restrictions being enacted throughout the country. We tried our best to give them enough time to prepare for the event, but the reality is that the situation is always going to be volatile.
‘Despite that, we were able to see remarkable performances by a few of our up-and-coming grassroots swimmers. In fact, we are delighted that a national record was even established during the event. We hope all our swimmers continue to persevere. We also hope that those who were not able to participate are motivated to join us in the next event,” she continued.