National Junior Rowing Championships becomes a virtual event, due to problems with the venue. This results in over 10,000 entries and a lot of the AAYR schools take part.

The number of schools taking part breaks through the 40 mark for the first time. These schools take part in the Indoor Championships at Birchwood High School and over 400 youngsters enter the event. The event runs as two divisions for the first time.

Liverpool John Moores University bestow the award of Honorary Fellow to Richard Sinnott as recognition of his work with AAYR. This is the highest honour the University can bestow.

The new name All Aboard Youth Rowing comes into being and the new website also comes to life.

Henley Stewards Charitable Trust continue to be our major funders and we are very grateful for their continued support. It does help to have the backing of a major player and we look forward to continuing our relationship.

British Rowing have also been a great help. Behind the scenes we have been able to take some big steps forward, and this would not have been possible without their support.

To conclude, we have thirty seven state secondary schools taking part in forty sessions per week. That’s potentially four hundred youngsters per week!

The regatta ran on time, following on from the new format that we tried the previous year. Over thirty two schools took part and lots of youngsters got to experience the thrill of a boat race. Salford and Culcheth were the Girls and Boys Champions.

As we grew, the name Warrington Youth Rowing was becoming more problematic. A lot of communication that was meant for Warrington Rowing Club ended up at Warrington Youth Rowing and vice-versa. The fundraising team also pointed out that a restricted geographical name was not very helpful when applying for grants. Reluctantly, as we are very proud of our roots, we agreed to change, and All Aboard Youth Rowing became our new name. This has been a much bigger project than we expected and included re branding, a new logo and website. We will keep our regional site names, such as Warrington Youth Rowing, but generally we will be known as All Aboard Youth Rowing.

We had our annual pilgrimage to NJIRC at The Copper Box in London. The team was smaller than the previous year, as the cost was becoming prohibitive. We took the fastest twelve girls and boys from our indoor competition and they performed admirably. This is a fantastic experience, watching twenty four children from a large number of schools bond into one large team. Apprehensive strangers at the beginning of the day, and then frantically swapping phone numbers with other students at the end of their adventure.  Thanks to London Youth Rowing for organising this great event.

Our two competitions were a great success and went off well with healthy numbers of children attending. At the indoors we had over 400 children entered. This was very much the limit of the Birchwood Sports Hall, and we will be looking to make changes to the format for January 2025

September 2023 started with plans for a new site based at Runcorn Rowing Club. Initially, this was going to be called Runcorn Youth Rowing. It was a slow start but by March 2024, it had grown to four schools. It’s hoped that by next year we will be up to seven schools. Like Northwich, Runcorn Rowing Club, is based on the River Weaver which is generally a very well-behaved piece of water, ideal for our young athletes.

In September, we also launched a new site at Rudyard Lake hosted by North Staffordshire Rowing Club. This was not on the agenda, but Macclesfield Academy had initially wanted to join Northwich Youth Rowing and then couldn’t get a timetable slot to fit in with the Northwich schedule. The easiest solution was to open at Rudyard Lake, a beautiful stretch of water near Leek in Staffordshire. This site does need some more schools and more attention from us, but the team at North Staffs RC are doing a great job. More to come here next year.