Brophy

Each year, at the end of the Summer season, Swimming ACT hosts the Brophy meet. We have done so for over 30 years! These days the meet is held at the AIS on Sunday near the end of March.

Brophy is a team event and over recent years seven teams have competed in the meet. These teams come from the southern half of NSW, the ACT and the NSW/Victorian border region.

The events contested are the 50m events plus relays. Age groups for the individual events are 8 and under, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 and over. Each team can enter two swimmers in each event and every legal swim gains points. There is an overall pointscore as well as a handicap pointscore.

There is fierce, but friendly, competition across the meet as each team vies for those all important points! Our team fights very hard to take out the overall pointscore each year.

In 2019 one of the regular teams was unable to compete in Brophy so we, Swimming ACT, fielded two teams: our ACT team and the Joan Kellett team.

Being part of a Brophy team is great fun and is a wonderful opportunity to meet and swim against youngsters (and the not so young) from across country NSW.

The selection of our ACT team(s) generally takes place following the local Speedo Sprint heats with selected swimmers receiving an invitation and their club notified of their selection once the initial selections are done.

The Brophy meet commenced its life back in the days well before the Swimming ACT area was formed. The Brophy Shield came into being back in the days when we were part of the Southern District Amateur Swimming Association. When we became a district in our own right, the Capital Territory Amateur Swimming Association (which later adopted the name ACT Swimming and then Swimming ACT), the hosting of the Brophy Meet came across to the new association.

The participants in the Brophy Meet adopted a handicap system to determine the winning team who would claim the Brophy Shield. Later, an additional trophy was added, the Peter Love Trophy, which commemorates one of our Life Members. This latter trophy is awarded to the team with the highest pointscore.

Winners over the years