AFTER a new beginning earlier in 2024, Shannon Athletics Club now has over 200 members and its facilities have been improved, with further developments on the way.
Club Chairperson Eamonn Cleary said it has been a great start for the re-formed club.
“We’re up to 201 members, which is remarkable,” he said.
“We started off with a very optimistic target of reaching 200 by the end of the year, which is a fairly large number, it makes us a fairly big club.
“Within nine months we hit it, and it’s absolutely amazing to see how many people are interested in it. Hopefully it grows even further from there.”
He said that talks on getting the club going started late last year, before really getting into gear in early 2024.
“We had a meeting to kick it off at the end of last October,” he said.
“We had a good bit of work to do to get up and running again and then we relaunched the club on January 31 of this year.
“We have gone from zero members to over 200 members in that space of time. We have kids and adults competing all the way up to national level already.”
The club’s grounds are now very busy.
“We said we would kick off once a week due to coach availability,” he said.
“We started it on a Wednesday night, it was one session a week at the start, but what we had to do fairly quickly due to the numbers was to split the Wednesday session in two, because we were regularly getting 80 to 100 kids coming down.
“We launched an additional Monday night session to cater for the kids and we have launched adult sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, doing a bit of sprint training and throwing.
“Over the last few weeks we have had cross country sessions on Sundays. It has been fairly full on, going to training five nights a week.”
There has also been a lot of improvements made to the club infrastructure.
“One of the big things when we started was that where we’re located, between the camogie club and the rugby club, there is a lot of traffic in the area,” hew said.
“We were very conscious of getting cars off the road and not parking on the bike lanes there.
“One of our first developments was getting the car park done.
“We put in a car park to cater for about 40 cars.
“The former county councillor Gerry Flynn was very helpful to us on that. Just recently we have added a perimeter jogging track, it’s a 720 metre track and it has been very popular.”
There is also work underway to put in place a throwing area, with cages being put in place and part of the ground already levelled off for it.
“It’s an 8.5 acre site and a lot of work is needed to keep it ticking over,” said Eamonn.
“Again we’re only nine months up and running and we have a lot of landscaping done.
“The gravel track makes the place look a lot better and it’s night and day really, compared to what we started off with. It’s thanks to the hard work and dedication of a fairly sizable committee and a bunch of volunteers and coaches.”
In the future, the club aims to put in place a full running track at the Shannon facility.
“We plan on developing a full 400 metre, eight lane track, here in Shannon.
“We were fortunate that the previous committee had planning permission in place,” said Eamonn.
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.