Comments requested for the Cork Track and Field League...

As you may gather from the race calendar, there are a glut of road races throughout the year in Cork and Munster but there were up to recently, very few athletics meetings. In an effort to address this, the Cork County Board of Athletics Ireland initiated a graded league in 2011 and John Buckley Sports came on board as the sponsor to make the whole thing possible.

After holding six meetings in 2011, a further eight were held in 2012. The graph below shows the average number of people attending each of the meets...

Considering that the number of meets increased from six to eight, the slight increase in average numbers from the Cork clubs represents a real improvement. One figure to note however was the number of people coming from outside of Cork to take part. Perhaps it might suggest that there is some scope for similar types of leagues to start in the other counties???

With two years of the graded league now complete, the organisers would like to get some feedback and suggestions. They have issued this message....."The committee responsible for the John Buckley Sports sponsored County T&F League is conducting a review of the 2012 league. It would be much appreciated if athletes/coaches/interested parties would take time to fill out the questionnaire and return it Fergus O’Donovan c/o corkathletics@gmail.com "

You can find the questionnaire HERE

There are some stats on the 2011 league HERE and HERE and the 2012 league HERE and HERE

It would be wrong to think of the graded leagues as some sort of competition only for elite athletes. There are a wide variety of events on offer like the 800m, 1500m, 3000m, etc and they are ideal way for the ordinary club athlete who may be just used to road races to try a low key athletics event to see what it's like.

You can see the list of events that were on the 2012 programme in this previous post . It might be something for you to consider for 2013?