SOUTHEND Diving brought home a hugely impressive 15 medals from the National Age Group Diving Championships in Sheffield earlier this month.

The successful programme, based at Garon Park, sent a strong team of 18 divers to the competition after months of training and competing at regional events.

And after four intensive days of competition, Southend Diving returned with a gold medal, eight silvers and six bronze.

Over three days of individual events, Southend Divers excelled and recorded a number of personal best scores.

Max Lano, 13, was leading the field in the 3m springboard event until his very last dive when he missed his entry spot on an inward 2 ½ somersaults.

But Max showed tremendous resilience in making a strong comeback the following day on the 1m springboard to take gold. Team mate Hudson Lawrence followed up his synchro silver with an individual bronze in the same event.

In the synchronised diving 8/13 years category one metre springboard event, the duo of Max Lano with Hudson Lawrence, and Hayden Rayment with Todd Geggus started the Southend medal haul with solid performances.

Max and Hudson narrowly missed gold by just over a point to take silver with Hayden and Todd earning a well-deserved bronze medal.

Not to be outdone, team mates Marney Easen and Amie Hudson in the 14/18 years 3m synchro event took silver.

Jessie Millham, 11, and only recently recovered from a serious wrist injury, won silver on both the 3m springboard and the 5m platform, Marney Easen, 15, won bronze on the 3m event with team mate Amie Hudson, 16, 0.1 points behind her in fourth.

Marney followed this up with a silver on the platform event in a hard-fought battle with Eden Cheng from Crystal Palace.

Olivia Blower, 17, completed the club’s tally of medals with a strong performance in the Group A highboard demonstrating some excellent control and entries that earned her a bronze medal.

And Head Coach Shan Veasey was over the moon with the team’s efforts.

“The whole team did well,” said Veasey. “They exceeded last year’s medal tally of 12 medals which is excellent.

“Congratulations should go to all the divers, many of whom put in good performances and achieved personal best scores, and several young divers who had only quite recently qualified and were competing in their first National Age group events.”

Full results and scores can be found at diverecorder.co.uk.

Anyone interested in learning how to dive can contact southend-diving@fusion-lifestyle.com.