POOLE’S Matt Collins and Emily Clarke were crowned Dorset’s long distance champions as the curtain came down on the 2016 county championships.

But while Clarke finished 27 seconds ahead of her nearest challenger in the 800m freestyle in Dorchester, Collins, 16, faced a battle with high-flying team-mate Jacob Peters in the 1500m.

Peters, 15, better known as a butterfly sprinter for which he holds British junior records, stuck within a bodylength of his team-mate for 48 lengths of the 25m pool.

But at the 1200m mark, Collins started to pull away, using his greater experience in this event to record a winning time of 16min 49.54sec.

Peters took silver in 16:56.09 – his first time under 17 minutes – with Ben Porter completing a Poole clean sweep of the senior medals in 17:13.48.

Bournemouth Collegiate School’s (BCS) Jack Arnell won the junior title in 17:17.75 with Swim Bournemouth’s Ollie Fairman second in 17:20.62 and Seagulls’ Miles Ward third (17:58.02).

The trio also respectively won the 15yrs, 14yrs and 13yrs age group titles while Poole’s Robbie Hemmings won the 12yrs gold.

Clarke, 18, clocked 8:53.57 to win the 800m freestyle gold – her 10th senior title of this year’s championships.

Poole team-mate Thea O’Keefe won the senior silver in 9:20.05 just 1.5sec ahead of Swim Bournemouth’s bronze-winning Savannah Barman (9:21.59).

The junior podium produced another Poole clean sweep with gold, silver and bronze medallists Jazz McCrea, Teagan-Mae Graham and Jessica Kelleway separated by just nine seconds (9:23.69, 9:26.91 and 9:32.76).

Swim Bournemouth’s Isabelle Hepburn and Alexandra Palotai-Avella won the 14yrs and 12yrs titles respectively.

With the championships now complete, Dorset ASA secretary Di Gibbs has drawn up a series of points tallies and medal tables following criticism that the traditional system of awarding points to the first eight in each age group and each event favours the club with the most entries.

“This year we have been asked by the coaches from several clubs for club points that more accurately reflect the top three placings in each event, and also a medals table,” she said.

A points table with places one to eight scoring sees Swim Bournemouth as the top club with 3,703 points from 939 entries followed by Poole with 3,607 from 868, BCS third (2,325 from 448) and Seagulls fourth (1,169 from 378).

With only the first three in each age group scoring, Poole move to the front with 747 followed by Swim Bournemouth (657), BCS (569) and Seagulls (175).

Poole also dominated the medals tables winning 29 senior golds with no other team taking more than three and 100 age group golds – almost twice the tallies of BCS (57) and Swim Bournemouth (54).

But BCS led the way in junior titles with 22 compared to Poole’s 11 and Swim Bournemouth’s one.

  • See today's Daily Echo for championship results for Bournemouth Collegiate School, Poole, Seagulls and Swim Bournemouth.