Crawley club at the 2025 RLSS National Lifesaving Championship finals

The Lifesaving Finals is the more traditional form of Lifesaving competition as the Lifesavers use real subjects in the Swim & Tow Rescue as opposed to weighted manikins, plus they need to demonstrate their ability to perform both Dry land and Water-based rescues for previous unknown scenarios within a 90 second time limit.

In the 25m Swim and 25m Tow events, Gemma and Edie’s total time won the pair bronze medals. Two eighth places in the Dry land and Water-based rescues along with a disappointing 10th place in the Line Throw event, due to missed throws, gave the SER a respectable 8thplace. Overall, excluding the Masters, the SER came 7th out of the 13 regions competing.

Gemma and Edie then joined forces with Abi Smith and Mia Ellis—the SER’s senior girls’ pairs finalists (ages 14–16) from Horsham Lifesaving Club—to compete in the RLSS Junior Mixed National SERC Team Finals. The result was silver medals, a tremendous achievement when considering the Crawley girls were two of the youngest in this challenging test of lifesaving ability. Again, the four girls had just 90 seconds to complete a rescue involving eight casualties that included subjects on the bottom of the pool, panicking and injured swimmers, along with by-standers. The secret of their success was to first rescue the high priority subjects, which in the case of Water-based situations are always the non-swimmers and not the subjects on the bottom of the pool.

Managing the entire SER squad for the second-year running was Crawley Town’s Line Throw champion, Martin Schofield, who despite being Sussex’s Individual men’s champion, missed out on the opportunity to compete in the National Finals as, frustratingly, he could not attend the Regional Qualifying Events.