Newcastle Vikings Handball Club hosted their first ever handball event at The Lakeside Centre in Killingworth on Saturday 2 December 2023 for families in the local community.
Over 40 children, aged between 3-14, from across North Tyneside and Newcastle came along, joining in with the handball fun activities run by the Vikings’ own Young Leaders.
Lots of passing games, ball handling skills, shooting exercises and they all got a taste of match play. There was so much positive energy on the court. Hopefully this will light the spark among more families, and they will join us on a regular basis in our sessions we run at Benfield Centre for Sporting Excellence on Wednesday evenings.
In addition to the handball activities taking place, we ran a Vikings Sponsored Bike Ride, cycling the distance of Hadrian’s Wall.
Our very own Bike Volunteer lead Caroline Snell said, “In total we cycled the whole length on Hadrian’s Wall, a total distance of 84 miles. It was fun to get the parents involved and it warmed us up on a cold day”.
After the Try Handball event we saw our Youth players playing a friendly handball match. It started off very intensely with lots of good setting-up of team players and some incredible save by the goalkeepers.
At half time we saw ‘Orange’ leading with one goal, 12-11. The second half started off a bit slow, but the pace quickly picked up and one goal after another was scored by both sides. Eventually ‘Non-Bibs’ put in a power boost and got ahead of ‘Orange’ with a few goals.
Full time score, 21-25 to ‘Non-Bibs’. A well-deserved win!
Overall, they all played really well, and it was great fun to see them on the court, putting all the skills learned in their training sessions into match practice.
Newcastle Vikings Annual Big Christmas Raffle was also drawn on 2 December, with over 500 tickets having been sold. A massive thank you to all the companies and families who donated some amazing prizes: Restaurant Hjem (www.restauranthjem.co.uk/), High Gosforth Golf Club, The Alnwick Garden, Newcastle Castle, Whitley Bay Ice Rink, Cake Stories (www.cakestories.com/), Tesco Kingston Park, Brewdog, Tipsy Parties (www.tipsyparties.co.uk), Newcastle Eagles Basketball and The Lakeside Centre (https://my.northtyneside.gov.uk/category/257/lakeside-centre).
And not least to all our volunteers for making this event happen.
A special mention goes to our new Grassroots sponsor as well, ‘Hay and Kilner’, for helping to make handball grassroots sport more accessible in our community!
