Henley Stewards Charitable Trust continue to be our major funders and we are very grateful for their continued support. It does help to have the backing of a major player and we look forward to continuing our relationship.

British Rowing have also been a great help. Behind the scenes we have been able to take some big steps forward, and this would not have been possible without their support.

To conclude, we have thirty seven state secondary schools taking part in forty sessions per week. That’s potentially four hundred youngsters per week!

The regatta ran on time, following on from the new format that we tried the previous year. Over thirty two schools took part and lots of youngsters got to experience the thrill of a boat race. Salford and Culcheth were the Girls and Boys Champions.

As we grew, the name Warrington Youth Rowing was becoming more problematic. A lot of communication that was meant for Warrington Rowing Club ended up at Warrington Youth Rowing and vice-versa. The fundraising team also pointed out that a restricted geographical name was not very helpful when applying for grants. Reluctantly, as we are very proud of our roots, we agreed to change, and All Aboard Youth Rowing became our new name. This has been a much bigger project than we expected and included re branding, a new logo and website. We will keep our regional site names, such as Warrington Youth Rowing, but generally we will be known as All Aboard Youth Rowing.

We had our annual pilgrimage to NJIRC at The Copper Box in London. The team was smaller than the previous year, as the cost was becoming prohibitive. We took the fastest twelve girls and boys from our indoor competition and they performed admirably. This is a fantastic experience, watching twenty four children from a large number of schools bond into one large team. Apprehensive strangers at the beginning of the day, and then frantically swapping phone numbers with other students at the end of their adventure.  Thanks to London Youth Rowing for organising this great event.

Our two competitions were a great success and went off well with healthy numbers of children attending. At the indoors we had over 400 children entered. This was very much the limit of the Birchwood Sports Hall, and we will be looking to make changes to the format for January 2025

September 2023 started with plans for a new site based at Runcorn Rowing Club. Initially, this was going to be called Runcorn Youth Rowing. It was a slow start but by March 2024, it had grown to four schools. It’s hoped that by next year we will be up to seven schools. Like Northwich, Runcorn Rowing Club, is based on the River Weaver which is generally a very well-behaved piece of water, ideal for our young athletes.

In September, we also launched a new site at Rudyard Lake hosted by North Staffordshire Rowing Club. This was not on the agenda, but Macclesfield Academy had initially wanted to join Northwich Youth Rowing and then couldn’t get a timetable slot to fit in with the Northwich schedule. The easiest solution was to open at Rudyard Lake, a beautiful stretch of water near Leek in Staffordshire. This site does need some more schools and more attention from us, but the team at North Staffs RC are doing a great job. More to come here next year.

In the summer of 2023, we started talking with Alistair Marks, Marieke Hagemans and Nathaniel Reilly-O’Donnell of British Rowing about our future plans. They were keen to see how they could help us to professionalise and become more sustainable. Through their support this enabled us to appoint Jen Hinds as our new Office Manager. Jen is well known at Warrington Rowing Club and is an experienced coach for Warrington Youth Rowing. Her experience of rowing, energy and knowledge of IT and Marketing is a great addition to our team. Alongside Jen we now have a fundraising team that is tasked with the sustainability of the Charity. The support from British Rowing, alongside the long term visionary support from Henley Royal Regatta Charitable Trust, has helped us to move forward and become more established.

In July we eventually held our regatta with a slightly reduced entry due to a teachers strike on the original date. We were pleased to welcome along Siobhan Cassidy, Chair of The Boat Race Company as a guest and she was delighted to see so many youngsters taking part in a regatta for the first time. It was a radically altered format and in general it worked well. Knutsford and Winsford were the winners on the day.

Based on the results of the indoor competition we were able to select a team to take part in the National Junior Rowing Championships at The Copper Box Arena in London. All four of our areas were represented and we sent the largest team to date, comprising 40 rowers and 35 adults.

We managed to hold our two Youth Rowing competitions this year, despite a teachers strike on our original regatta date. The indoor competition was held at Birchwood High School on 25th January. We had our biggest entry to date with 375 young rowers taking part.