St Teresa’s swimmer to compete in Commonwealth Games in Australia

Kate Beavon, in Grade 12 at St Teresa’s, has qualified for the Commonwealth Games and will be going to Australia to compete from 4 April.

Kate has spent most of her life swimming and hopes to continue swimming professionally after school. She started learning to swim at five years old and was approached by her older sister’s swimming coach to join a swimming club.

“Initially I thought, no, this is working out fine but then when the place where I learned to swim closed down I decided I wanted to join a club,” said Kate.

She joined the Waterborn Swimming Club when she was six years old. Now Kate swims for her club and school. “The school is really supportive about my swimming so they try to organise the swimming practices at school around my swimming.”

Qualifying for the Commonwealth Games is no easy feat. Kate trains two and a half hours a day on average, however, if she has a morning training session she can swim as much as five hours a day. She also spends three hours a week at the gym.

She tries to use her time as best as she can, to ensure she can balance both her school work and training.

Going to the Olympics is Kate’s ultimate goal and to achieve this she decided to go through some ‘ stepping stones’ which included swimming in the Fédération Internationale de Natation world championships last year and the Commonwealth Games this year.

“Just getting the experience will be amazing and be able to swim against the people that I swam against in the worlds [ the world championship].”

“The world’s was my first major international competition so when I walked outside there were maybe 15 000 people screaming so I got a little tense but I did better than I thought I would.”

To qualify for the Commonwealth Games Kate had to qualify at the trials which took place in December. Of the 28 South Africans that qualified, only 23 will be participating in the Commonwealth Games.

In the future, Kate hopes that she will be a swimming coach or a swimming physiotherapist after a professional career as a swimmer.

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