Apologies for my recent absence, life has been pretty manic over the last weeks, my birthday was just the start of the manicness (is that even a word?) and I mention it because I was at a rugby festival at our club for most of the day, my rugby family came up trumps! One of my fellow rugby Mum’s made me a birthday cake, the Under 10s sang Happy Birthday to me under the posts and my Godfather got the welcome I knew he would from our Chair and First Team Captain! Epic day, I loved it! This was phase one of the busy times I won’t bore you with the rest!
Skipping forward a bit now! As some of you may already know I have three kids and my eldest has Cerebral Palsy and hates rugby! Well, it would seem he has changed his mind he had found a passion for wheelchair rugby! He’d mentioned he wanted to play so I contacted our local club and we were invited to go and watch the National Championships at Medway. We’ve been to watch wheelchair rugby in the past and I knew he’d jump at the chance, as did my ‘rugby dude’! What I wasn’t expecting was for both of them to be invited to go and play at the Junior National Championships in June at Stoke Mandeville to help form a Barbarian team. More logistical planning for me to do!
I will bring you news of the event once we have some fun off-season stuff! Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay for the whole thing, only the Saturday morning, but this meant that we got to watch our local team play, Canterbury Hellfire. This is going to feel a bit odd for us as Canterbury Hellfire is affiliated with Canterbury RFC our local rivals in rugby! I will have one boy with one team and the other with our local team mixed feelings on that one at the moment especially as we are most definitely part of the Ashford RFC family. Isaac was not impressed at the idea, still, two very different forms of rugby even if they are both as brutal!
One thing that did strike me was the camaraderie, the ethos and the welcome rugby welcome! Players that had never met us made us feel welcome and chatted to me and the boys my biggest boy was being welcomed into a sporting ‘family’ a ‘rugby family’! The guys were great and I’d like to thank them all for inspiring my dude, he realizes he can achieve whatever he wants to achieve and his wheels won’t stop him. Yes, I had a moment!
Unfortunately, Canterbury Hellfire didn’t win the championship, a team called Crash did and funnily enough it was a couple of their players that had chatted to us during our visit so a big shout out to Stuart and ‘the other guy’ I can’t remember his name and I only remember Stuart’s because there was three of them! Maybe they’re all called Stuart?!
Anyway, I digress, big shout out to some fab guys for taking the time to talk to my boys and inspire my dude and most importantly congratulations on winning the trophy. Here’s Stuart with the trophy! I’m just going to call them all Stuart, I’m rubbish with names anyway! With only two weeks left of rugby season I can see myself having my time taken up with a different form of rugby over the summer! Next week is a tournament followed by the rugby club ball and awards ceremony! I’ll let you know how that goes!
