At the end of the the second Coloplast Divison 2 weekend, Marauders Tigers lead the table with 15 points with Sharks a close second with 13 points. Teams did really well to battle the weather to get to the tournament in Leicester but the quality of the tournament made it all worthwhile. The only apparent casualty was Solent Shark’s van (picture below) which took the full force of a fallen tree! Fortunately there were no casualties and the chairs in the back of the van were undamaged. The van also acted as a block for a number of private cars parked next to it!
There were some great individual performances over the weekend and it is striking to see that all the awards went to players from new or relatively new clubs. This is great news for the future of the game as we continue to find new players and get new clubs off the ground. Awards this weekend went to: 0.5 Alex Smart (Tigers), 1.0 Imogen Steele (Sharks), 1.5 Myles Pearson (Sharks), 2.0 Matt Bonney (Sharks), 2.5 Jamie Stead (Tigers), 3.0/3.5 Faye West (Hawks), MVP Ed Larkin (Hawks) – congratulations to all winners. A big thank you to all the volunteers and officials and those who support the teams for making this event happen.
Last week I attended the Board of Trustees and presented the proposed World Wheelchair Rugby Challenge 2015. I am pleased to report that the Board has agreed to us taking the event forward but quite properly is concerned that at this point the event is unfunded. Ensuring we can fund the event is a key area of my work at the moment and if any of you know of companies or organisations that would like to be involved as a partner then do put them in touch with me. I remain confident that we will get some great partners on board and that this will be a highly attractive and successful event. Eron Main, the Secretary General of IWRF arrives in the UK next weekend and I will be meeting with him on a number of matters and the WWRC15 will be one of them. The Board of Trustees also approved the 2014-15 Business Plan which we have recently completed and sets out the work we have scheduled for year starting April. This can be downloaded from the website here.
Finally, we have had some very positive comments about the new site but as I reported last week this is the ‘raw’ product and we need to continue testing it and adding content to really bring it alive. Please do send in your stories and your photographs so that we can continually refresh the site and maintain its interest. The design of the site makes this easy for Daniel to do so please send him your inputs. We are also really trying to build our social media links so please tweet and retweet things of interest so that we can build a strong wheelchair rugby network. And just to sign off… thank you to Coloplast for sponsoring another weekend of club rugby.
David Pond
