By Jim Morris

VANCOUVER – The newest aquatic facility in the Lower Mainland will host one of the oldest swim meets in Canada when the 54^th Mel Zajac Jr. International begins Friday at the University of British Columbia Aquatic Centre.

The Zajac meet, which ends Sunday, will attract 515 swimmers from across Canada and the United States. It will be the first major competition in the $39-million centre, which opened earlier this year. The meet will also serve as a yardstick for at least 10 members of Swimming Canada’s team set to compete at this summer’s FINA World Championships in Budapest, Hungary.

“It’s always a measuring point of how your early season training is going,” said Tom Johnson, head coach of the High Performance Centre – Vancouver, which calls the UBC facility home. “It’s not like a definitive measure but it’s certainly an indicator of how you are moving forward from the selection moment at the Trials towards the peak competition of the year.

“It’s important in the sense that you need to assess how the training is going and be able to make adjustments on the basis of those results in terms of the next eight weeks that lead towards Budapest.

Prior to the meet, 14 members of the Swimming Canada’s national men’s team came to Vancouver for an intensive eight-day training camp. The sessions incorporated relay and individual training along with team building exercises like yoga, a ropes course, mental performance workshops and a talk delivered by former Olympic team member Scott Dickens.

Martyn Wilby, Swimming Canada’s senior Olympic team coach, said the camp is a step along the road toward rebuilding the men’s team for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and beyond.

“I wanted to get them together so they had the opportunity to swim as a group,” said Wilby. “They are all good in their own right but they don’t have the opportunity to race the best in Canada on a day-to-day basis.

“This is what we are trying to get here, trying to develop that competitive culture among the men.”

Jeremy Bagshaw, who trains at the High Performance Centre – Victoria, believes the camp can help turn a group of individual swimmers into a team.

“It’s always good to get a bunch of guys together that are on the same page,” said Bagshaw, a 25-year-old national team veteran. “Our goal this summer is to swim really fast, especially our relays and all the individual events.

“A good way to do that is bring everybody who is the best in Canada together. When everybody works together like that, you have more a team atmosphere.”

Yuri Kisil, a member of the Rio 2016 Olympic team, said having the training camp lead into the Zajac competition allows the swimmers to test their strengths while learning what areas need improvement for the world championships.

“It’s kind of the start of summer,’ said Kisil, a 21-year-old Calgary native who trains at the HPC – Vancouver. “You see how you do at the Mel Zajac, then I have Santa Clara (Pro Swim Series) after that. I’ll see how I do here. I want to see if I can do pretty well here to give me confidence for the summer.”

The Zajac meet has been a rite of passage for swimmers like Markus Thormeyer, Kisil’s HPC-VAN. The Delta, B.C., native was 14 when he first competed at the event and has grown from a wide-eyed teenager to one of the Canadian men looking to make a mark on the international stage.

“I remember when I was younger it was the big meet and there were always these big names coming in,” said Thormeyer, 19. “I was always looking up to them and I’d never make the A final. Through the years, slowly I have been progressing and now I’m the one making the A final. Now I’m winning events.

“This event . . . went from being my focus to now it’s the meet where I race to see where I am in training.”

The Zajac meet originated in the 1960s and was called the Canadian Dolphins International Invitational. It was renamed in 1997 in honor of Mel Zajac Jr., a member of Canada’s 1976 Olympic swim team who died in 1986 in a kayaking accident. Just eight months later his brother Marty was killed in an avalanche.

The list of swimmers at this year’s meet includes Canadian Olympic bronze medallist Hilary Caldwell, 2016 Olympians Erika Seltenreich-Hodgson, Kierra Smith and Rachel Nicol; plus members of the U.S. and Canadian national junior teams.

The UBC Aquatics Centre opened in January and replaces the old facility, which was built in 1978. Training in the new pool is like going from a rotary telephone to an iPhone.

“It’s like night and day, literally,” Kisil said. “It was very dark in the other pool. This facility is a world-class facility. It just means the world to be able to train here every day.”

Natural sunlight bathes the facility, which features a 50-metre competition pool and 25-m recreational pool with diving boards and accessible ramp. There’s a steam room, sauna and hot tub. The change rooms, viewing decks and spectator areas are bright and clean.

Thormeyer is impressed most of the pool’s water comes from recycled rain water harvested from the building’s roof. This saves about 2.7 million litres of water annually.

“I thought it was really cool they made it clear this was a very sustainable pool,” said the environmental science student. “It’s not like the old pool which was just wasting water.”

Johnson said having a world-class facility will help breed future Olympic and world champions.

“This has got great ambiance,’ he said. “Its good light, good air, good water and good space.

“The opportunities that exist here are fantastic relative to what needs to be done at the high-performance level in international swimming. Frankly in Vancouver, and in the Lower Mainland, there is no pool of this calibre that can host a competition.”