Junior Pumas…the story so far

It seems like quite a long time ago that we first started playing around with the idea of junior Pumas. Since before Christmas we had discussed running a junior course, and over the following months we started putting the wheels in motion. Applying for grants, attending coaching and safeguarding courses, buying equipment, finding coaches. There was quite a lot to do before our intended start date of 13 April 2016.

But 13 April came round soon enough, after an initial meeting with our official coaches, Mark and Alastair, we anticipated that on that first week we’d have between 5 and 20 juniors joining us….

Our first session

We had over 60 juniors join us! To coach Mark’s astonishment (and possibly a little bit of fear) we had 60 children ranging from 5 to 15 turn up, wanting to fine tune their running skills!

To be honest, we were a bit thrown, we never expected such an incredible turn out. But after a couple of minutes of shock, we got stuck in.

We decided to split the groups based on age ranges, so we had:

  • under 7’s
  • 7 to 9’s
  • over 9’s

Each group was lead by a coach or assistant coach and then some willing volunteers from our adult running groups. For our first week we stuck to the cricket pitch and did a variety of skills based games with each of the groups.

After a slightly chaotic, and exhausting hour, we got some great feedback from the kids in each of the groups and most of them (we will concede that running isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (although we will never understand why?!?)) were already looking forward to coming back next week.

Here are our Junior Pumas (and coaches)

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Junior Pumas (we’re runners not photographers!!!)

Over the next few weeks…

We were amazed that each week we had at least 60 children turn up ready to run (there’s only been one week since we started that we’ve had less than 60, and even then 54 kids still turned up).

After our first week, we’ve also introduced a lot more off road running into our sessions, even our under 7’s have been enjoying some of the great trail routes around Northowram!

We’ve also started to adapt the groups, so that we’re working on ability based groups rather than purely aged based groups. This means that, regardless of their ability, each child is running with a group tailored to them.

Here are a couple of shots of the sessions in action…

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Where we are now

All the kids that attend each week are showing some brilliant running potential. Each week we’re staggered by their enthusiasm and willingness to try something new. Especially when something new is running up hills!

West Yorkshire Sport have also put together a brilliant video that shows what we’re about and how we got to where we are:

 

We’d love for as many of our juniors as possible t0 sign up and run the Northowram Burner 2.5k fun run.

We’re also looking into organising a Pumas summer event, open to adult and junior members and possibly entering some of our juniors into some junior races. Keep checking the website and Facebook group for more information.

The best way to find out about what’s going on with Junior Pumas is to join our Facebook group.

If you’ve got any questions, comments or ideas then please just email us at juniors@northowrampumas.co.uk or speak to one of us on a Wednesday after the sessions.

We’d also like to say a massive thank you to all the parents who bring their kids along, all of our adult Pumas who help us out on a Wednesday, and Alastair and Mark from Calder Valley Running Club who come and help us coach each week.