Samoa Swimming will participate in the 14th FINA World Swimming Championships (25m) 2018 in Hangzhou, China. Hangzhou is the capital city of Zhejiang province and is an economic, cultural, science and educational central city in the Yangtze. It will be the first time for Samoa Swimming to travel and compete in China though they are no strangers to the World stage. The four person team fields two top swimmers who have competed on the World stage many times. Lushavel Stickland, top backstroker and freestyler for Samoa, is ready to hit the water and compete. Lushavel has had a successful short course season in Australia, already hitting FINA B qualifying times for the 100m freestyle. She competed at the previous Worlds Short Course in Windsor in 2016 and has made marked improvement since then. Seasoned swimmer, Brandon Schuster, will join the team from the USA where he is currently training and studying in California. He will enter both the 200m and 400m IM events and has shown progressive work his events since the last World Short Course in 2016.
As Samoa receives 4 universality placements for the Worlds, the final 2 teammates to round off the squad are younger swimmers who show promise and depth for the team. Andrea Schuster, who represented Samoa at the 2017 Commonwealth Youth Games in the Bahamas, will compete in the 50m free and 50m fly events and Thomas Morriss, who trains in Auckland, is joining the Worlds team for his first time and will compete in the 100m sprint events.
FINA World Short Course competition falls at a difficult time for most of the athletes. School final exams, university testing, end of the year commitments and graduation ceremonies all compete with the swimmers’ time thus making it challenging to field a team and ensure the swimmers remain committed and in top form for the competition. While this team is ready to cut some times and gain valuable world-class performance experience, the entire Samoa Swimming team are keeping their training suits on and staying focussed on being race-ready for the 2019 Pacific Games in Samoa.
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