Sat the 7th Feb saw another great year for cvfr juniors come to its traditional conclusion with a fantastic evening of celebration. The club has over 60 members with ages ranging from 6 to 18 and every week regardless of whether it’s lint or dark warm or cold wet or dry we regularly have 40+ meeting on a Tue evening.
Throughout the year a series of races some local some national are selected to make up the championship and juniors can compete in their age group against their friends to be crowned as champion. Through the magic of number crunching and the mathematical genius of the club chairman Bill Johnson we can also crown the overall junior champion.
The evening started with some games and wonderful food provided by local caterer Jan. Before getting down to the main business of handing out awards.
As a club cherry have a very clear approach that first and foremost all our members should enjoy their running and that it should be fun, from this base we can make sure juniors keep coming back week after week and can then achieve their potential which can and has lead to many of the club’s juniors enjoying great success. To this end the presentation evening saw everyone receiving recognition for being part of the club, for those who had progressed on to racing further awards were given. We always want to recognise effort as much as success.
Finally we were able to crown our age group champions and runners up. In the U8 boys Patrick Casey was the run away winner, Jordan Millard was runner up. In the girls race Matilda Baldaro claimed a convincing victory. The boys U10 age category was the most fiercely contested with just one point making the difference after 6 races Jude Baldaro was the winner with Eilo Beesley and William Hall tying as joint runners up. The corresponding girls champion was Beth Blacker and runner up after another series that was decided at the last race was Olivia Sylge. The U12 age group winners were for the boys Jed Denneny and Robyn Casey for the girls and the runners up were Danny Wills and for the girls Cherry Sylge. Toby Brunt won the U14 boys competition. The U16 boys race was again tightly contested and had been nip and tuck all year so it was no surprise that it came down to the final race of the series, where Jack Denton was able to hold of the challenge of Martin Howard.
The nationally qualified coaches at Calder valley rounded of the evening by presenting their special Coaches awards to three individuals who have worked particularly hard all year and these awards went to Tom Owen, Maya Brunt and Reuben Chalmer.
As befits such an exciting year of junior fell racing the overall champion was again decided at the last race and came down to whoever could amass the most points between Beth Blacker and Jack Denton and with Jack winning his age group race on the day he was able to pip Beth. Jack took away with him the highly prized award of a framed photograph of Stoodley Pike provided for the club as a result of Walsh shoes sponsorship with his name being added to the list of all the previous winners.
A great night was enjoyed by all but now attention has already turned to training hard and racing to success in 2015.