2022 Review – Yorkshire Warriors
As we prepare for the 2023 season, our Clubs take a look back at their 2022 successes! Yorkshire Warriors Polocrosse Club, based in the North East, tell us all about their 2022 season:
We started the year with fortnightly arena training sessions throughout the winter months. This kept a few existing players going through the winter (mainly the youngsters) but most importantly brought in new members and sparked people’s interest in the sport. From this we have produced some brilliant junior players and they had an outstanding season in 2022, including success at the Nationals.
Our first big event of the year was the Easter training camp, which exceeded our expectations as we had 50+ entries! This was a great weekend with a number of trainers attending to bring variety to the coaching and we concluded with instructional chukkas. We also had a demonstration chukka or two with ex world cup players Guy Robertson, Martin Brookes and Max Pedley taking on a Warriors invitation team. Throughout the spring we carried on the training sessions including a horsemanship day with Guy Robertson in April and a weekend training with Tom Simkin in May.
On the field we managed to pull together a B grade team for the Arden tournament (which we hope to see more of in 2023) and 2022 was the year our young PJs dominated with many tournament wins and collecting numerous best player awards.
We hosted our home tournament in June at our new venue near Edwinstowe, having lost our old venue at the National Racing College. We had the biggest entry ever for this tournament and were thrilled to attract the A grade for the first time. We believe it was a great success and it attracted some great feedback from the other clubs. We finished the season at the same venue with the Yorkshire Shield event held in October. Luckily this year the sunshine stayed out for us and we managed to have some great training from Tom Simkin followed by mounted games, a farm ride and then fun chukkas to finish off on the final day. Very popular was the barrel racing event which drew out the very competitive spirit of most Warriors!
We ended the year with a brilliant Christmas party at the Morton’s lovely family home, which consisted of a sit down 3 course meal, presentation of the club awards, raffle and a disco in their party cellars to end the night in style. Jo Gale received the Charles Mason award and Kate Mckee received the UKPA Players Player award which were presented at this bash but were awarded in 2021.
We are all now looking forward to the start of the 2023 season!