A brief update from the JudoScotland Chair Marc Preston on activity in April.
Dear Members,
The month kicked off with a rescheduled catch-up involving myself, Judith and our Vice Presidents – Rick Kenney, Jim Feenan and Graham Campbell. Unfortunately, our President, Colin McIver was unable to join us on this occasion. As always, it was a highly productive chat where opinions were freely exchanged.
A couple of weeks later, Judith and I had an online meeting with Markus Moser, Sporting Director of the Austrian Judo Federation. It was an extremely positive meeting where Markus shared many insights re: the Austrian set-up. I’d like to thank Markus personally for the time he spent with us.
The month was wrapped up with our JudoScotland Board meeting where we had decided to concentrate on a couple of really meaty subjects, both of which will help JudoScotland to move forward in the best possible way.
As Members are most likely aware, JudoScotland has now reassumed control of our own High Performance Programme, something I have personally been looking forward to for some time. I truly believe it is the way forward for us and I am really excited about the programme going forward. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank sportscotland for all their input over the years and for helping to facilitate the transfer of the programme back to us. We will aim to ensure that we have it all operations properly solidified in the coming months so that we can give our athletes the best possible chance at the Commonwealth Games next year and going forward.
It was great to see three Scottish judoka selected to represent Great Britain at the Cadet European Championships next month. Congratulations to Coen Gilbert, Lexi Buchanan and Vasiliy Menshykov on their selection.
The last weekend of the month saw the Granite City Grand Prix take place in Aberdeen, as always this was a jam-packed event.
Looking forward, we’re all highly excited at the recent announcement that Tato Grigalashvili has been announced as the guest star at The Gathering later in the year. Tato is a truly world class, triple world champion from Georgia. I had the pleasure of being in the arena watching him perform at the Paris Olympics 2024 and am absolutely sure that we’re in for a treat at the Gathering! Something for our judo community to look forward to and building on our world class line-ups at these events.
There are so many positives that are happening in JudoScotland at the moment, and I am truly excited about our future!
Marc Preston, 7th Dan