Good Luck!!
Thursday 2 June 2011
Cardiff's senior men's British League and women's UK women's League teams start their 2011 campaigns on Saturday next, 4th June.
Both teams will be looking for a strong start as they bid to maintain their positions in the premiership divisions of their respective leagues
Whereas the women travel to Manchester, the men will have home advantage at Cardiff International Sports Stadium.
Come to support your team on Saturday.
This is an important season for the club's teams and men's team manager gave a two page interview to Athletics Weekly recently.
You can read the full interview under.
Who are the best? Cardiff’s male athletes or their women? It is a question that is often asked amid the ribbing on club nights at the new international stadium in the Welsh capital and for some it extends beyond the evening.
James Williams is team manager of Cardiff men and his girlfriend Imogen Miles is a long and triple jumper for the women. “My girlfriend thinks that if I try to get some sponsorship for the club, it should always be split evenly between the men and the women,” he said.
“I always tell her I have gone out and got it. But we end up having to split the money – she always gets her way! There is always a bit of banter between the teams because the women have been going up and down between the Premiership and Division One, so they were rubbing our faces in it when we were down in division two and three. We had no option but to try to compete with them and get up to the Premiership as well.”
And that is exactly what they did. At the start of next month, the pendulum of Cardiff power will be starting to balance itself out a bit more evenly on the track when the new domestic league seasons begin.
While Miles and her team-mates are back in the top division of the UK Women’s League again, the men have returned with their second promotion in as many seasons in the British Athletic League.
As Williams said: “The whole club has a new buzz about it. It was our second successive promotion and we did not really expect it. We thought last year that we would be consolidating our position in Division One.
“The key is to stay there. It is a long time since Cardiff’s men have been in this division and we are excited. We are one of only a handful of clubs who have been in the British League since its inception, we are former British League winners but we have always underperformed in it.
“To make it back to the Premiership shows the turnaround of the club in the last few years with the new stadium – the youngsters coming through and it seems to be filtering into the senior team.”
Williams, at 28, is a stalwart at the club. Which might seem a bit odd for someone so young, but he has been there for 12 years and has progressed through the ranks – from middle distance runner to steeplechaser to team captain and, for the past two years, team manager.
On June 4, he will be ready for the most important team talk of his life when his young squad gathers for one of the biggest matches in the club’s history. They have the honour of hosting the first of the four League matches of the season and Williams, who works for Gilbert Rugby, has been going over in his mind what he is going to say.
“I want them to go out there and use the experience,” he said. “They now have the perfect platform to compete against the best in the UK and it is effectively going to be an additional four AAA championships for us.
“It is going to be the best competition some of them have ever had – and it might be the best competition that they will ever compete in. They have to use it and enjoy it.”
The magnificent Cardiff International Sports Stadium, which was opened in January 2009, says so much about the progress of the club: they are thriving off the track with these outstanding facilities and now both their men and women’s teams are ready to establish themselves on the top table of the sport’s leagues.
The menu is not going to be easy for the men, led by the strength of Newham & Essex, the defending champions. But Cardiff, who were formed in 1882 as Roath (Cardiff) Harriers, starting out as a cross country club, want to recreate some of the glory years of the 1970s.
They were British Athletics League champions in 1973, 1974 and 1975, but Williams knows there is no rush. First, it is about establishing themselves there again.
Looking down the list of club record-breakers, the big names of the past include Colin Jackson and Jamie Baulch. But now the club is very much about developing youngsters for the future, who are gelling together so well that they made their mark on Division One from the start 12 months ago and never gave it up.
The names to look out for in the BAL season include young sprinters Liam Duff, 22, in the 100m and 20 year old Gareth Hopkins in the 200m.
Joe Thomas, 23, will be aiming to progress, having run the 400m and 800m for the club last season before finishing seventh in the latter event at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi where he was joined by team-mate Gareth Warburton, 28, who was fourth in the 800m in India.
Wiliams said: “We are a very young team – but the guys have matured. When they were on the team at first, they were young and their performance level was not what it is now. We probably struggled – but these guys have stayed in the squad, they have used the British League to improve and we have a fantastic team atmosphere.
“In the past, Cardiff has had a number of superstar athletes who never really competed for us. There was then a massive gap in experience and performance from those guys at the top and those who actually performed.
“Now we have a group who are not superstar athletes but they are Welsh internationals. They make AAA finals. If we can start well, with the first match in Cardiff, we can do okay. But we know it is going to be tough.”
They may have thought that last year but, on home soil, like this time, they finished second behind Sheffield in the opening meeting of the season, and that is the way the table ended up.
Cardiff’s women made a flying start to last season, winning their opening match at home and never looked back. They triumphed in the next two fixtures, at Bedford and Wavetree, Liverpool, and won promotion in style, champions by four points from Enfield & Haringey.
But as Williams looks ahead, he is hoping the success of the men could also inspire some of the old club members to return. He said: “The ironic thing is that in some of the events that we are quite weak in, a lot of the guys who will be winning the event in the League are ex-Cardiff athletes.”
One is discus thrower Brett Morse, who now competes for Birchfield and was unbeaten in the Premiership last year and will be one of the stars again in the season ahead.
But that is for the future. As Williams contemplates that team talk, he cannot predict what is ahead in the next few months. But what he does probably know is that the Cardiff line-up might not include him too often.
“I compete, but only when we are incredibly desperate,” he said. “I ran last year to earn us a poor point in the steeplechase when no one else was available but I spent the entire race running around thinking who I was going to pick in the 4x100m and 4x400m.Hopefully you won’t be seeing me in the Premiership but you never know.”