Moyle and Ballymoney Sports Awards victims of shakeup

Always one of the most popular fixtures in the local sporting calendar in their respective areas, the Moyle and Ballymoney Sports awards, will no longer take place, instead they will be replaced by one award ceremony covering the entire council area.

This move will cause concern amongst the sporting fraternity with the fear that the ‘smaller’ areas like Moyle will lose out.

Chairman of Moyle Sports Advisory committee Tom Christie commented: “I attended a meeting last week of the Chairs of the four Sports Advisory committees. From the get go we were told by Richard Baker, Leisure and Development Services Department Director, that there would definitely be one awards evening, so the Moyle and Ballymoney awards will be no more.

“At the moment there are still some positions to be filled and that won’t happen until the end of July so things won’t progress much until after that. A date in November has been mentioned for the new awards evening and my concern is that it doesn’t give us much time to plan, organise, get nominations sorted in such a short space of time.

“The other main concern is for our sportsmen and women. I worry that it could wipe out any Moyle winners especially if they were to come up against the likes of Olympians from Coleraine. There was chat about the introduction of more regional awards to compensate for that but until the appointments are made we won’t know.

“When you look at the number of people who attend the local awards, Coleraine would have 300 people, Ballymoney 200, Moyle between 100 and 150 and Limavady around 200, where would you find somewthere that would hold that many people so folk are going to lose out on the opportunity to attend.

“At this stage there are a lot of questions to be answered. The only thing we do know for certain is that there will be one awards evening and I guess we have to make the best of a bad job.”