Group photo of the participants at Winchester's Family and Friends Experience DayEach week we are digging through the Goalball UK archives to look back at some of our favourite memories from the sport from years gone by.

As the Winchester Friends & Family Experience Day was due to take place last weekend, we are revisiting the first one back in October 2018.

Winchester Goalball Club, one of the largest goalball clubs in the country, tapped into the local goalball enthusiasm in the area and hosted an amazing Friends & Family Experience Event back in October 2018. With 15 eager participants including the Chair of Goalball UK, John Grosvenor, and his wife, Amanda, they took to the court.

The new recruits’ first task was to set up a court ready for play.  This achieved, next came a brief introduction, using a warm up as an example, on working with blind and partially sighted people. The participants were keen to understand more about playing goalball, so after a practical lesson on defending and throwing, they were let loose on the court.

Winchester coach Adam Knott demonstrating a lunge at the Family and Friends Experience Day

The session ramped up a gear with explanations on ‘How to be a Good Tournament Coach’ and the ‘Basics of Refereeing and Table Work’. With the fundamentals of the sport learnt, the attendees put all of this into practice with a hands-on coaching, refereeing, and playing session.

Resulting from this experience day, Bev and Karina subsequently attended a Goalball UK Officials course at RNC, during Talent Camp in February 2019. They have since helped out at Goalball UK tournaments and events, as well as Winchester training sessions.

This was such a fantastic example of engaging with the local community and introducing the basics of goalball to a wider audience – we can’t wait for the next one!

With restrictions on what we can do with our sport at the moment, Goalball UK has been exploring options how we can bring events like this to life in a virtual setting. We are preparing to launch our online ‘Introduction to Officiating’ courses to encourage even more people to give these great goalball roles a go.  Please keep checking our website for more information, and in the meantime if you have any questions about the ‘Introduction to Officiating’ courses please email steve.cox@goalballuk.com.