Disability Sportshall Athletics continues to grow

The Leicestershire Disability Sportshall Athletics competition is an important event in the school competition calendar, engaging both special and mainstream schools in adapted indoor athletics events to include young people with a wide range of disabilities.

Recent years have seen a steady growth from 7 schools in 2010 & 2011 to 10 schools in 2012. 2013 was the first year to see countywide mainstream schools invited where there was another increase with a total of 25 schools entering with 193 young people in 29 teams from across Leicestershire and Rutland in the Level 2 Competition. This year (2016) there has been an impressive 30 schools entering 308 young people in 46 teams spilt across KS2, KS3 and KS4&5 age groups from across Leicestershire & Rutland, all supported by qualified UKA officials and the Midlands talent spotter from British Athletics.

This event has now been included in the school games calendar for 3 years. With 7 out of the 10 districts competing in 2013 to all 10 districts competing this year in 2016. We saw 84 out of the 308 young athletes progress to complete in this year's Level 3 event with some great talent! Teams were given the opportunity to qualify through a Level 2 School Games event which the KS3 event was held at Crown Hills Community College and the KS4/5 event at Aylestone Leisure Centre.

The Primary School event saw a total of 147 young people compete from 20 schools over 2 events. These events are still one-off Leicestershire & Rutland competitions, but the success of the events and huge increase in schools participating creates a fantastic platform for it to also look to be potentially included as part of the LRS School Games in the future.

- A 'user friendly' disability classification system developed by England Athletics
- The introduction of a new scoring system developed in partnership with Sportshall UK
- The purchase of adaptable equipment by the Leicestershire Disability Athletics Development Group
- Collaboration with Leicester-Shire & Rutland Sport to integrate the existing competitions into the Leicestershire & Rutland School Games programme, the first SG programme in the country to do so for this event!