STRANGE as it may sound but I spent a big part of last week staring at a computer screen watching numbers change and believe it or not it filled me with excitement!
For the first time since the inception of the Scottish Women in Sport Awards, we went live with one of our categories, the SSE People’s Champion and left the public to go wild and vote. Within the first hour of going live, there were over 400 votes, which I put down to the power of social media, which I know is very well utilised by women in sport. By the end of the week, when the voting closed, we were in excess of 4000 votes.
I need to add here that the initial judging panel who took the nominations down to a short list of four said it was no easy task, and in the final four we have a mixture of tennis, judo, hockey and football all of them very deserving in their own right, but as always you can only have one winner.
Jodie McEwen, currently employed by Street Soccer as their Women’s co-ordinator is an example of how sport can change and save lives. Her story is an inspirational one that tells how she turned her life around through football. At 15, after pushing her mum to the limit, Jodie was homeless and described herself as having a lot of bravado but no confidence behind the facade. It took her until she was twenty-one to realise she had to change and football was her saviour.
Khalid Gehlin – what can you say about a young man who pulled out all the stops to save a friend’s life? On hearing the news that friend and judo colleague Stephanie Inglis was lying in a hospital bed in Vietnam with 1% chance of survival unless money could be found for her treatment, Khalid started an online funding campaign which raised in excess of £325,000 for Stef and eventually brought her home. The proof of his work is the great progress Stephanie is continuing to make.
Then we have Mary McCabe, a volunteer secretary with Queens Park Tennis Club, who understands that private tennis clubs can be expensive and aims to provide opportunities for all, regardless of age, ability, ethnic background or income.
Mary spends the equivalent of a 40-hour week running, managing and promoting activities at the club and her methods are clearly working as, since 2008, she has grown adult club membership from five to 65, and they now have over two hundred young players take part in competition.
Finally our last shortlist candidate is Susan McDowall from Hockey and in the words of the nominator, she is simply the best! As a team manager and former internationalist herself, her passion for hockey is still as strong as it was in her playing days.
Not only does she liaise with all of the training squads about logistics for training sessions, she organises the kit, washes their kit, deals with the budget, attends meetings with staff at Scottish Hockey and keeps the rest of the management team in check.
She inspires the girls by her passion for the sport and always keeps a calm head when players need her assistance. She even went as far as dyeing part of her hair blue at the Europeans to inspire the players on game day!
So how do you choose between four so worthy yet so different candidates? You leave it to the public to decide and let them cast their votes. All four nominees will be in attendance on the night when we announce the winner, along with our other 7 category winners and I am really looking forward to meeting them all.
A few extra tickets have been released for the dinner on 11th November in Glasgow, so if you want to join us in celebrating the success of our women in sport and their supporters, drop me an e-mail at scottishwomeninsport@gmail.com.
More information at http://swisawards.co.uk/
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