Congratulations to Fiona Anderson, on receiving the Tony Dane award for Coaching dedication.
This was a new award that was put in place last year. We recognize that there is many coaches out there who do a stunning amount of work, and they fly almost under the radar for that, because they are grassroots. The decision was made to to actually dedicate an award one for the these coaches. There are a lot of factors that come into play when we were discussing this and deciding on the award and this recipient has hit most of them.
Fiona has been involved in swimming since 1979, which doesn’t seem an awful long time ago. But when you look at it is 40 years which is like really quite frightening when you think about it. Initially she was a swimmer who then they progressed to coaching. Despite being a swimmer and having competed at masters as well, only one of the children actually entered into swimming as a sport. She made the foray into coaching, having been gently persuaded by Tom Watson, who, I’m sure some of you will still remember, and he was Inverleith’s Head Coach at the time. Fiona has been head coach now for over 11 years with the club. She has actively also been involved with the Lothian region for many, many years, and was part of the team that used to take the swimmers away for regional weekends and they always has a knack of never looking flustered, ais always well organized, which is an asset.
Congratulation to Fiona Anderson.