Beckenham festival date confirmed

The Beckenham U17 Festival will take place again next season, and will be on the same weekend as last year - so 8th October. Beckenham will be sending invitations out shortly to those who entered last year, so that will include us.

Last year we started well with a comfortable win over the hosts, but then lost 5-0 to Rochford in a game we dominated for all but the last 10 seconds of the first half. Losing the final game to Petersfield (the eventual winners, as I recall) meant that we failed to achieve our place in the semi-finals. Next season that should be out minimum goal.

Those who took part last year will recal that this festival - that it is aimed at "new" U17 teams - has unusual rules, like uncontested scrums and no hand-offs (Nim's equalising try against Rochford was disallowed for the latter, to everyone's surprise - including Rochford!). Still, its a good day out with some excellent facilities and opponents from across the South East that we would not normally meet outside of the National Sevens.

We'll certainly therefore enter one team. As its a 10-a-side event we could maybe just about enter two teams - but we'd need pretty much everyone to be available if we were to do that.
No need to make decisions yet, but when we be wanting to know. So mark the date in your diaries now!

A couple of weeks later there is the Rochford Festival - this time for U14s and U17s. However, entry is retsicted to only 1o teams in each age group so its very likely that - regardless of availablity - we'll onlybe sending one U14 and one U17 team to that. For the U17s this potentially means taking a big squad - much as Welwyn did last year - but if we do there will be probably be plenty of opportunity for people to "guest" for other teams (and we rather hope that you will take up such opportunities when they arise).