While her school-mates are on the countdown to the end of the school year, Abbey Trewern is counting down to one of her biggest events of the year.
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The 360 Scully Park swimmer is training hard in readiness to dive in against the best in the state at the 2023/24 NSW Senior State Age Championships.
The first of a few major events on the 16-year-old's radar for the season, they will be held at the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre from Sunday, December 10 to Saturday, December 16.
Trewern warmed up for the championships with some great results at the club's annual long course carnival on the weekend. Although there wasn't anything too warm about it with the rain arriving in time for the Friday night session and continuing throughout Saturday.
The first official club carnival for the season for the New England and North West area, 145 swimmers from near and far took to the water including 27 from the host club.
The longer distance events were run on Friday night and the rest of the carnival on Saturday.
Despite the wet weather, Trewern said it was a really good carnival and there were still some good times swum.
She had a successful meet winning all six of her events and swimming close to her best times. She even got the better of some of her male counterparts a few times with boys and girls racing together some of the events.
"It's always nice to beat the boys," she joked.
One of the team leaders at the club, more so than her own performance, the highlight of the carnival was the swims of some of her club-mates.
Caitlyn Costelloe is one that stood out for her.
"She swum her first ever NSW Country time in the 200 metre breaststroke," Trewern said.
After just falling short of the required time at the long course qualifying meet that Tamworth City and Kootingal combined to host two weeks ago, she swum four seconds under it on the weekend.
"Watching that for me was more fun than swimming my events," she said.
For Trewern the carnival wasn't so much about the results but going through her race plans and fine-tuning ahead of state.
"We'll (she and club coach Kate Bolte) definitely be making a couple of tweaks over the next couple of weeks," she said.
She will have a busy program, qualifying in six events - the 50m freestyle, 200m medley, 200m breaststroke and 50m, 100m and 200m butterfly.
Not surprisingly fly is her favourite stroke.
"It sounds so much cooler if you can say you can swim butterfly," she explained as one of the reasons she loves it.
Her "third or fourth" state champs, Trewern would love to make a final.
She only narrowly missed out last year, finishing 11th in the 15 years 200 fly.
This year her focus is more on the 100, although she said she would like to "have a nice result" in the 200.
Trewern's swims over the weekend also contributed around 1km to her tally for the 'Swim For Sick Kids' challenge, which she is one of six Scully swimmers participating in.
She was expecting to pass triple figures before the fundraiser wraps up on November 30.
Club-mate Alexander Scanlon-Dawson has also qualified for the state championships.
