Birmingham and Midlands Schools Race 2022

Sunday 27th March being Mothers’ Day meant most mothers enjoyed a lie in and breakfast in bed followed by Sunday lunch out with all the trimmings and no mess at home. For the ski mums across the region it was a far more action packed day supporting their children at the Birmingham and Midlands Schools Race run by MSC's team of volunteers.

After a 3-year absence due to Covid it was great to see the event resume with 55 skiers representing 14 schools. In the spirit of inclusiveness, the race was open to individual entries to complement the team competitions, allowing 11 children to take part despite not having enough skiers in their schools to fill a team. With many of these individual racers taking home medals from the event it is hoped that they will generate some interest to fill a team next year. The five schools (Solihull School and 4 of the Warwick Foundation schools) that were able to enter teams did so with all age ranges covered from U10 to U19 and most of those in both boys and girls categories. Finally, in order to give the individual racers a taste of team racing, we drew them at random into three "MSC" teams of mixed age and gender.

Onto the racing itself; we had a range of abilities from GBR podium racers, recently blooded Club National participants and youngsters having their first ever taste of ski racing on the day. There were some closely fought individual results; the U12 girls and U14 boys in particular with both categories' top two spots separated by just 0.3s. In the team event the fastest team overall was one of the MSC teams loaded with strong club racers. Notable performance also goes to the Solihull School U14 boys who topped the timings for all school teams beating U19 and U16 teams in doing so. Solihull School's U12 girls fought off a closely matched Warwick Prep team to take top spot in their category. There was success for Warwick Foundation (their 7 teams showing that the MSC collaboration is reaping dividends) as the Warwick Junior School team U12s won the boys' stubbies category and Kings High's U16 girls won the girls' gates competition.

Many thanks from me to all the volunteers who made the racing possible, a pleasure working with you all for my first race management in 15 years. Plenty of parents grabbed a clipboard to gate judge under the watchful eye of Les Jones. Thanks also to Julie Jones for taking on the starter role at short notice, David Beech for herding the kids onto line at the top, Emma Farrington for commentating as well as Brandon Fennell and Dave Lee for their usual double act on all things timing and data and Di's support with bibs and registration then keeping things on the right path throughout. Last but certainly not least mention is to Joe Feiven, he set an excellent course on the day that was challenging enough to keep the experienced racers interested yet simple enough for every racer to finish at least one run. Full results will be made available in the results archive on the website. In the meantime below are a snapshot of the individual podiums and team results. We hope to build on this year's success next year so look out for early notice of entries once we set a date and start nagging your PE teachers to help you raise a team!