West Waterford Athletic Club Juvenile Notes
Gold for Saoirse and Silver for Sarah at the Munster Track and Field Championships
The second and final weekend of the Munster track and Field championships under 12-19 took place in Cork last weekend. It was extremely warm on the track which may it difficult for the athletes and in particular the middle distance runners.
Saoirse Quinn competed in her first ever Munster competition two weeks ago finishing 4th in the shot. In the intervening two weeks she has worked hard on her discus and it paid off on Sunday when she threw 18.66 to win her first Munster title in the under 16 discus.
In the under 17 discus Sarah Slevin was competing with the 1kg discus for the first time and led the competition for five rounds but was overtaken in the last round by Kate Naughton who won by 12cms. Kate comes from a family steeped in athletics and is the granddaughter of Sean Naughton who coached Sarah’s father Ronan when he competed as a juvenile for Nenagh AC
Paul Mullarkey competed in the under 18 boys discus and finished 4th with a personal best of 29.52 for the 1.5kg discus.
Eoghan O’Brien competed in his first Munster competition and there was a great competition in the under 16 boysdiscus between 4 Waterford athletes with Eoghan being pipped for a medal in the final round but he was happy to have thrown over 30 mts.
We had three athletes competing on the track. First up was Naoise Mac Murchadha competing in his first 1500m. Having competed in the 800m two weeks ago Naoise was more familiar with track running this time and stayed well up in the front bunch for much of the race. There was a sprint down the final straight with Naoise finishing in 7th but less than a second separated 4-7th places.
Mark Blackwell competed in the under 19 boys 1500m and again Mark ran a steady paced race to finish 5th and his steady running earned him a new personal best time of 4.35.15 which was 4secs faster than he ran in Kilkenny last year.
Our final competitor was Angelina Chizhikova who finished 6th in a very fast under 17 girls 400m.
Well done to all the athletes who competed in such trying conditions.
All Ireland Qualifiers
The following athletes have qualified for the All Ireland Championships. They will be held over 4 days in August and I will let you know as soon as I know what is on each day.
Sarah Gaffney under 12 600m
Doireann Hickey under 17 walk
Eabha Hickey under 16 walk
Paul Mullarkey under 18 shot
Saoirse Quinn under 16 discus
Sarah Slevin under 17 shot and discus
