Loyalty to club reaps the reward
CAITLYN Mackney has shown her club the ultimate loyalty.
The North Burleigh stalwart has been with the club since she was five years old and refused to be lured to another boasting better facilities or a bigger training squad.
“I’m the only 15-year-old at my club at the moment,” she said. “All the others have moved to other clubs. As you get older everyone tends to leave for different coaches and teams but I’ve been here since I was five.”
Mackney’s loyalty was rewarded yesterday when she competed in the under-15 Female board rescue with younger teammate Keoni Muller, 14. Despite racing together for the first time yesterday, the girls finished third in their heat and qualified for the quarter-finals.
“Keoni is the age group below me so it’s pretty awesome to have a team for once,” Mackney said. “It was a great race. We had a lot of laughs riding down the waves.”
Muller said the girls had only ever practised jumping onto the board before they raced on surf lifesaving’s national stage.
“We’ve never had the confidence to race together,” she said. “I never used to like board or swim but we thought we’d give it a go and now we’re in the finals. We’ve never practised catching waves together but then we got one and surfed it all the way into shore.
“We’ve practised getting on the board but not catching waves because we were a bit scared about that,” Mackney added.
Despite not progressing past the quarter-finals, the girls were still stoked with their result.
“We just wanted to wing it and see how we went,” said Muller.