WBHS

Westville celebrate a great weekend in the pool

Lucas Beukes U15A Butterfly

 

Westville Boys’ High School had a successful weekend in aquatics, winning the Alan Burt Gala for the 11th consecutive year, beating Kearsney’s 1st Water Polo team 9-1 and topping it with pupil Teague Loelly being called up to the SA U17 Schools’ Water Polo team.

The 52nd running of the Alan Burt gala was hosted by KES at St Stithians and swimming at altitude would again be a challenge for the coastal schools. The gala was first swum in 1966 by Parktown, DHS, Maritzburg College and KES and has grown to a 10 school gala with five schools form KZN and five from north of the Vaal river. The gala has been won by KES and DHS fourteen times each and by Maritzburg College, nine times. Newcomers to the gala, Westville have won 10 times in a row and Glenwood have won once in the 52-year history.

Westville started off well winning the first 22 events with new records in the U16 Fly (Duckham, Mybergh, Meyer and Beukes), 4 age medleys (Rayment, Robinson, Beukes and Holtzhausen), u14 Breaststroke (Tarr, Campbell, Holtzhausen and Lea) and u17 Backstroke (Rayment, Irvine, Burgess, and MacDonald). A poor start in the  first leg saw WBHS lose the open butterfly to St David’s but bounce back with another record in the 5 ages backstroke (Holtzhausen, Brijlal, Meyer, Rayment and Nortje). Westville then broke the u16 freestyle record (Duckham, Maseko, Beukes and Meyer) and the 5-age freestyle (Holtzhausen, Brijlal, Meyer, Bosch and Nortje) while losing out to Glenwood in the open freestyle.

WBHS claimed their 11th consecutive win in this traditional gala and were presented with the trophy by Alan Burt who had travelled up for the gala named after him. A strange fact of this year’s gala was that the 10 positions did not change at all from the 2017 gala.

Westville u14, u15, u16 and u17 age group did not lose a race at the gala and the u19s only lost two. The team scored 596 out of a possible 600 points

The top KZN schools will swim against the very strong Grey College, four JHB schools and Paul Roos in the WBHS invitational gala on Friday the 9th.

Results of the Alan Burt Gala – 2018

  1. WBHS – 596
  2. St David’s – 486
  3. Pretoria Boys’ – 416
  4. St Stithians – 372
  5. Glenwood – 366
  6. Kearsney – 330
  7. Maritzburg College – 280
  8. KES – 217
  9. Parktown – 141
  10. DHS  – 92