Thanet AC U13 Athletes Starting Their Journey

The historic venue of Crystal Palace was staging one of their last big meetings before going through a huge multi million-pound renovation of it’s facility by hosting the South of England Championships for the age groups of U13 through to U17 athletes.

Kitty-Rose Hatton (left) and Bella Winfield (right) at the U13 SEAA South of England Athletics championship. Photo by: Darren Hatton.

Thanet AC sent 2 of our future hot prospects to give them a taste of the experiences that they are undoubtably going to face in years to come. It wasn’t a case of what medals they were going to achieve, it wasn’t a case of breaking championship records and it certainly wasn’t to try and put fear into the opposition. No, this was a prime example of something that it sometimes lost at the top in our sport of athletics, and this was that these 2 athletes were given a chance to go and experience a level of competition that was way above anything that they encountered before. It was a chance to make mistakes in an environment which meant that they would learn how to cope with it better next time, but more importantly to come away with a huge smile on their faces thinking “I want more of that”. Both of them did all of the above and passed with flying colours.

Kitty-Rose Hatton in action at the long jump. Photos by: Darren Hatton.

Kitty-Rose Hatton, in her first year of the U13 age group, was competing in the long jump. She went into the event ranked 15th out of the 22 athletes and was clearly nervous, especially when having to go through the call room procedure before being led out with all of the other athletes. After going through the warm up and setting out her run up she was then into the competition and managed to finish with her third best ever jump of 3.76m. Although upset with her performance at the tender age of 11 she soon realised how well she did when a number of athletes struggled on the day to surpass their personal bests, and also found out that she placed 14th overall!

Bella Winfield in action in the 70m hurdles. Photos by: Darren Hatton.

Bella Winfield, in the top year of the U13 age group, was in fine form in the 70m hurdles this season and came into this event very confident. It was such a shame that because the track wasn’t fit to use all 8 lanes for the races they had to run in heats of 5 athletes instead. This meant that not only did the track schedule fall behind over 90 minutes (meaning that Bella had to prolong her warm up for this amount of time!), but it also meant that in each of the heats of her event it was only the first place athlete that qualified for the final so she was really up against it. Bella took it all in her stride and performed amazingly well in her race, despite the pouring rain, to further lower her personal best to 12.66s to place her 2nd. This would of got her through to the final had there of been 8 lanes, but it didn’t hide the huge smile from her upon finding out another personal best had been achieved and that she is now ranked 12th in the South of England and 59th in the UK!

Kitty-Rose and Bella at the end of a soggy day. Photo by: Darren Hatton.

Coach Darren Hatton said “what these girls have learnt goes way beyond success as that will come with the level of talent that they both possess. Seeing the smiles at the end of the day means that they will be back, and they are already talking about how to improve…………… to which I turned to them and said “I think that’s enough for today, you both deserve an ice cream!!!!”.

• Darren Hatton