North Down Senior Men retained the Team Trophy, together with the 4 x 400m Relay Championship, at a poorly attended meeting at Antrim where ironically conditions were ideal. City of Lisburn were 2nd and Lagan Valley 3rd. The next generation – James Niblock, Ben Reynolds, Mark and Michael Patterson and Niall Robinson took centre stage and did more than enough leaving the older members in a supporting role. The Womens Match was more open from Round 1 but all teams were very small and Gemma McAnirn, Janine Munnis and Jessica Craig had to battle. Lisburn won helped by a virtuoso performance from Geraldine Finnigan with North Down 2nd and Lagan Valley 3rd. North Down had some good performances and several pb”s.
Mark may have been borderline in age but he was certainly good enough. Only Gareth Hill who was a guest runner anyway was ahead of him in a good “A” 800m where the first 5 ran sub 2 min. Mark broke his pb by a couple of seconds to run 1:56.92 min with Niall also sub 2 with 1:59.46. Michael ran away with the “B” 800m and also had a pb with 2:08.19. James won the 400m hurdles in 59.24 sec and did the 200m while Ben won the vault with 3.80m. Moving up the age scale, Philip Browne won the triple jump, John Saulter with 2nd was best of a host of North Down runners in the 200m while James Budde and Francis Marsh were 2nd and 3rd at 3000m with a pb for James of 9:01.02 and 9:07.05 for Francis. The winning relay team was Michael Dyer, John Saulters, James Niblock and Tom Reynolds.
The girls had to concentrate on picking up points rather than pb”s. However Gemma bagged a couple in the throws, winning the discus with 28.85m and throwing the hammer 20.47m and she did the triple jump too. Jessica also had a pb in the 800m with 2:30.40 min and ran the 200m, while Janine also did hammer, discus and triple jump.