Saturday saw the first Southern Athletics League match of the season at Kingston against Kingston, Portsmouth and Hillingdon.

For a lot of under 17 athletes this was their first ever senior competition and they took to it well with some excellent performances and a number of PBs.

Charlotte Vaughan ran her first 3000m race and made up over 30m on the leader on the last lap to snatch victory just before the line. In the other distance races there were wins for Fiona de Mauny and Darby Begley-Jones in the 800m A&B and the 1500m B for Jo locker with Fiona 2nd in the A.

There were wins in both 400m hurdles races with Sarah Burke winning the A and Jemima Hobbs knocking 3s from her recent PB to win the B. Sarah also won the A string sprint hurdles and the 400m with Lizzie Amos winning the B 400.

On the field there was a hammer pb for Sophie Mace (48.18) for 2nd in the A string with Sia Banbury winning the B hammer with a PB of 39.49. We had a double win in the discus with Sophie 43.14 and Tait Jones 36.61. Helen Channon was 2nd in the long jump with Lisa O’Brien winning the B event.

The 4 x 100m relay team of Lisa, Lizzie, Sophie and Helen came 3rd.

There were fewer highlights on the men’s side but Greg Conlon had a good win in the pole vault with 4.00. Sam Mace in his first competition with a senior weight hammer threw 47.06, for 3rd in the A string, Rob C Smith won the B with 41.02. We had two 2nd places in the sprint hurdles from Greg and Rob A Smith. Ben Marks and Matt Reed ran 4.19.9 and 4 20.4 for 3rd and 2nd in the 1500m. In the sprints Stu Channon and Josh Hathaway were 3rd A and 2nd B in the 100m and then reversed their order in the 200 with Josh 3rd A and Stu winning the B. The 4 x 100m team of Stu and Josh, together with Sam Bishop and Jamie West came 2nd in 46.6.

Well done to all who competed and apologies to those we don’t have space to mention but full results will be available on the SAL website soon.

Despite our largest ever SAL team of 40 athletes and all these great performances, the large number of empty events we had meant that in a very strong match we came last.

Hopefully we’ll have another strong team with fewer empty events in the next match which is on Saturday 20th May, also at Kingston.