THE first Scottish woman to run 1,500m in under four minutes was honoured at a glittering awards ceremony last night.
Laura Muir scooped Best Newcomer at the awards event held at Hampden Park in Glasgow by the national sports equality charity, Scottish Women in Sport (Swis). Multiple world record-holder in swimming, Danielle Joyce, was declared Sportswoman of the Year while 15-year-old Maria Lyle was crowned Young Sportswoman of the Year.
Talented football player Aminah Din took the Role Model title; Murrayfield Wanderers Ladies won Best Team Performance; Coach of the Year was Strathallan Canoe Club’s Jane Gibson and Official of the Year was international hockey umpire Sarah Wilson. Liz Taylor, of Prestonfield Golf Club, was voted the SSE People’s Champion after transforming the ethos of her club.
Swis founder Maureen McGonigle said the organisation had been delighted by the number of nominations received for this year. “Taking these nominations down to a short-list of four for each category was extremely challenging but it shows the interest and captures the passion that is out there for women in sport,” she said.
Laura Muir has been involved in athletics from a young age but it wasn’t until she arrived at Glasgow University in 2011 to study veterinary medicine that her athletics career began to flower. Coach Andy Young spotted her potential and, within months, Muir made her British under-20 debut in the 2011 European Cross-Country Championships.
At the 2015 IAAF Diamond League in Monaco, the 22-year-old clocked a blistering personal best of 3:58.66 in what was the quickest women’s 1,500m race of all time. Genzebe Dibaba of Ethiopia set a new world record of 3:50.07, while fifth-placed Muir carved her own slice of history by moving to second on the UK all-time list, behind only double Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes.
Muir is the first Scottish woman to run under four minutes and smashed her own 1,500m record of 4:00.07 set in Paris in the summer of 2014.
Sportswoman of the Year, Danielle Joyce, is currently preparing to travel to Texas in August to compete at the Deaf World Championships. Now at university, the former head girl at Stevenston’s Auchenharvie Academy has set the world of Deaf swimming alight with 10 world records and was top female performer at both the International Short Course Championships in the United States and the European Championships in Russia. Nationally she was recognised with the Youth Deaf Sports Personality of the Year award. She is a UK Deaf Sports Ambassador and will shortly be announced as Scotland’s first ambassador for the National Deaf Children’s Society. In mainstream swimming Danii has reached national finals and continues to improve her ranking.
From Dunbar in East Lothian, Maria Lyle has overcome cerebral palsy to become a rising star in athletics.
In 2014, Lyle was the youngest member of the GB and NI team at the IPC Athletics European Championships in Swansea where she became double European champion, beating the current world champion. Lyle had already broken both 100m and 200m world records in that year. In addition, she was announced as British Athletics Young Para Athlete of the Year and Scottish Sportsaid Sportsperson of the Year.
She has had an outstanding 2015 season so far, breaking her own T35 200m world record at the IPC Grand Prix in Dubai.
Role model Aminah Din first started playing football in her back garden when she was five years old. Despite facing disapproval of her chosen sport from some family members and the wider community, she persevered, developing into an exceptionally talented young Asian female football player. She has overcome the challenges to break down barriers, playing football both at a grassroots level and competitively with Rangers.
Currently, she plays weekly with the SEMSA/Glasgow Life ladies team and has been pivotal in inspiring other young Asian females who want to play football. Din has been a role model in breaking down barriers and the stereotypes associated with females in football.
The 2014-15 season has been an exceptional one for Murrayfield Wanderers Ladies. Building further on the success of last year, the women’s section clinched the BT Women’s Premier League title and the Sarah Beany Cup and the SRU Women’s Club of the Year Award while the youth section topped off a successful season with a convincing win against Hillhead Jordanhill in the Brewin Dolphin U18 Girls’ Cup Final.
On the international arena, nine Murrayfield Wanderers players represented Scotland last year with a further two gaining U20s caps, one of whom captained the successful squad. On one weekend this season Murrayfield Wanderers had more than 18 players representing either Scotland or the East region.
After suffering a significant injury, hockey player Sarah Wilson turned to umpiring and has recently been picked as one of the 15 umpires for the Rio Olympics. She is the only female representative from Great Britain and will be one of the youngest umpires to make an Olympic Games at the age of just 27.
This year she has taken charge of the European Club Cup final, then umpired the World League 3 competition in Belgium which was the qualifying tournament for the Olympics. In August she umpired the European Nations final in London between England and the Netherlands, gaining her 50th international cap in the process.
If it were not for Coach of the Year, Jane Gibson, it is doubtful if Strathallan Canoe Club, which focuses on slalom kayaking, would exist.
An accomplished athlete who still competes, she combines her passion for coaching with a demanding full-time job as a hospital consultant and also helps her two children compete at a high level.
As well as coaching she focuses on the club’s future, working on funding, grants, new membership strategies and staffing for expansion.
SSE People’s Champion Liz Taylor became involved in the junior section at Prestonfield Golf Club in Edinburgh in 2013, which at that time had only a handful of members. As the club’s ClubGolf coordinator, she introduced coaching sessions and secured a place on the club’s board of directors to ensure juniors were represented properly for the first time.
In 2015, 143 children were coached, 24 of them girls, and Prestonfield now have 178 junior members, of which 40 are girls.
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