Our big news for this academic year was a change of Name. We are no longer Warrington Youth Rowing and its associated regional names. This myriad of names was very confusing, and problematic for our office crew and fundraising team. We are now All Aboard Youth Rowing (AAYR), a name that hopefully encompasses our aims and image. We also adopted a new logo that was designed by a student at Priestly College; this logo is now displayed on all our new kit.

We also took the opportunity to re-launch our website.  Our new site is full of information, including the   impact of our work and highlighting the opportunities that may help us to secure future funding.  As part of this process, we commissioned a new video, and this was produced by Prism Studios a local Warrington outfit. The result is a brilliant video accompanied by the music of Coldplay and their track Speed of Sound. The band were as helpful as ever and as well as contributing with the costs they put an extract of the video on their socials, which attracted over 2 million views!

September is always an exciting time of year and this year we were delighted to be joined by a number of new schools. This means that we could potentially be boating over 400 children per week, across our six North West based sites. This is a fantastic achievement and is testament to our hard-working team. It is all held together by Jen Hinds in the central office; she does sterling work keeping all the plates spinning. We were joined by Adrian Stores and James Crowley this year to look after sustainability and funding, currently and going forward. Henley Royal Regatta Charitable Trust have made it clear that their level of funding is going to have to reduce, due to the rise in numbers of outreach schemes they are supporting across the country. Naturally they want to support as many of these schemes as possible, but the pot of money is only so big, and it needs to be spread more thinly. This makes the work of our fundraising team even more important to secure our future.

Whilst we continue to grow, the financial pressure on schools becomes more apparent and this year we suffered the highest ever level of session cancellations, some of them at unacceptable short notice. The reasons for these cancellations are mainly staff shortages, a lack of minibus drivers or available vehicles.

In October Liverpool John Moores University bestowed an Honorary Fellowship on Richard Sinnott. This is the highest honour that the University can bestow, and it reflects the work that is done by AAYR and the high esteem that it is held in.

In November we had our annual fundraising dinner at The Mere Court Hotel, and we were joined by Beverly Scott Heron as our or guest speaker. Bev is a keen supporter of our project and as the Principal of Sir Thomas Boteler C of E High School, she is well placed to illustrate the benefits of our project. The event was a great success, and we also managed to bag a couple of thousand pounds to put in the fundraising pot.

In the Autumn, the North West Rowing Community sadly lost Graham Miller, he was a stalwart of the Chester Rowing community. At his funeral part of the donations were donated to AAYR. This has enabled us to provide a trophy for the youngster that has made the greatest progress during the academic year. This year the trophy went to a young man from Marsden Heights High School, and his improvement was credited to attending the project at Agecroft Rowing Club.

We strengthened our group of trustees in the winter with the addition of Richard Davis-Boreham. Richard has a rich history of working in sport and worked for Sport England, amongst other in the past. He is currently Strategic Director for Greater Manchester Moving and as such brings a great deal of experience to the team.

In January of the new year, we once again hosted our indoor rowing championships. This event was supported by Henley Charitable Trust and British Rowing; we are very grateful for the help they provided. The invaluable help of Birchwood High School, in providing their sports hall also ensured that we had a successful day. We tried a new format and split the competition into two groups, one in the morning followed by one in the afternoon. This enabled us to have more competitors, but in a more relaxed atmosphere. We started slightly late but finished ahead of the projected finish time and had packed up by 4pm. Over 400 youngsters entered and rowed their hearts out, it was gratifying to hear from the coaches how many of them achieved PBs. The relays demonstrated teamwork and we even had staff races, which attracted a very loud vocal support from the youngsters!

Normally we would have taken a team to NJIRC, the pinnacle of indoor rowing for youngsters. Sadly, due to problems beyond their control, the event didn’t happen this year. It did though become a virtual event, and thousands of youngsters took part. It was well supported by our schools with some of them entering large numbers of rowers. North Liverpool Academy did very well by winning a relay silver medal.

Adrian, our Sponsorship and Events Fundraising Manager started the Oarsome Business Club. This is a group of businessmen and women who meet on a regular basis to exchange contacts and ideas, as well as supporting AAYR. From this initiative we devised a Boat Race Challenge and invited local businesses to take up the challenge of rowing the distance of the boat race on an indoor rowing machine. Hopefully we will be running this initiative in future years.

We also had Chris Farrell running in The London Marathon. After a few administrative issues Chris managed to complete the course in a very respectable time and raised a considerable amount of money for AAYR.

James has also been very busy and is collating feedback and statistics from the participants and schools taking part. This will then be used to strengthen future fundraising bids.

The May half term saw our sites hosting our holiday rowing camps. These are designed to encourage our young rowers to join their local rowing clubs and move forward in the sport. Some of our former youth rowers have gone onto bigger things. Next year’s Junior Captain at Northwich is a fine example, having started on the Youth Rowing Project at Northwich. One of the current Warrington Rowers has just landed a scholarship at Shrewsbury School, which will be a life changing event for her. We still have Ellie and Iffy studying in USA. Whilst home on summer holiday Iffy managed to race at The National Rowing Championships with Warrington RC and win a gold medal!

Our regatta in June is quite rightly the climax of our year. We were delighted to see over 70 quads racing on the Mersey, at Warrington Rowing Club. After the chaos of a few years ago this event now runs well and is a unique and interesting format.

In July we invited a dozen of our ex-Youth Rowing athletes to attend a summer rowing camp at St Edwards School in Oxford. The criteria for the invite was that the youngster had been on the Youth Rowing scheme, had joined a rowing club and are still active in the sport. The course was free, and all accommodation and meals were provided by St Edwards. The youngsters, accompanied by Jen Hinds and Gill Laidlaw, had a great time. They visited Dorney Lake, Leander Club and had time in Oxford. Many thanks to St Edwards, this was a fantastic opportunity that our team thoroughly enjoyed.

Every year of this project is different, and it continues to grow in numbers, influence and stature. We are, though, starting to find our groove. There are many highlights, of course there are also some lows, but we try and keep on top of them. This project wouldn’t run without our fantastic coaches, sadly these days too many to mention, but thanks to you all.  We also have a large number of volunteers, from Trustees to race monitors and they all make a large contribution to our overall success. Special and big thanks to Richard Kong who has been looking after the books since we started, he has decided to stand dwn at the end of this year. He is going to be replaced by Alyson Ashcroft, whose daughter Ruby is one of our ex-Youth Rowing pupils. Our professional staff just about keep their heads above water, firefighting, plate spinning and moving forward are the name of the game, but they love every minute of it!

Our main sponsors, Henley Royal Regatta Charitable Trust and British Rowing, are indispensable and without their continued support we would not be in the position that we are now. We can definitely say that since we started several thousand children have experienced our wonderful sport. Thanks to all the above.

Richard

CEO All Aboard Youth Rowing