The Best Festival that Never Happened
Nick Wilkinson Minis Chairman reporting pitch side. Huge amount of effort went into planning for what was meant to be a fantastic, fun day of youth rugby. Oh well, no fighting Mother Nature. As Nick say’s, ‘stay safe and warm!’
2018 Minis Festival
A big thank you to all our sponsors and advertisers this year. Your adverts in our Festival Programme are being distributed locally and to all the members.
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After months of meetings, planning, agreements, artworking, organising, volunteering and finally beginning to set up the 2018 Minis Festival, the weather Gods turned their backs on us and instead sent over the “Beast from the East 2”.
The day started out hopefully with volunteers braving the weather to start marking the pitches at 8am on Saturday morning, with the intention of this carrying on throughout the day.
However as the day progressed it became increasingly apparent that with all the best will in the world, we were up against it! By 4pm, having inspected the pitches irrespective of them being playable, with heavy hearts we decided we had to make the call.
With a sustained wind speeds of 17 mph and gusts of up to 31 mph, creating an effective wind chill of -8 degrees throughout the morning, dropping to -7 degrees in the afternoon, we performed a cold weather risk assessment and concluded we cannot mitigate against the identified risks. Number one was player welfare and safety followed by travel and site safety.
Helping the Community
ELRFC U11’s donated loads of left over perishable food to the homeless shelter in Leatherhead. They were extremely grateful and told us that this will be so well received by the people that they are looking after.
Here’s to 2019, where we hope the months of planning and the vision we have for the best minis festival ever will come to life…
