Stowmarket Colts Festival

Colchester took a very large squad of 28 players to the Stowmarket Colts festival and enjoyed pool games against Southwold, Harwich/Felixstowe, Bury and Ipswich. Coming second in the pool, Colchester were then defeated by Cambridge in the "second-place" plate in a closely contested game.

Below is a summary of the day taken from the "Eastern Counties Rugby Union" website:

Stowmarket, supported by Eastern Counties hosted their annual Colts Festival, with an increased participation of no less than 18 sides, with 15 teams, representing 13 clubs within Eastern Counties, and 3 clubs from Essex. This must now make this one of the largest Colts festivals in the whole country.

Clubs taking part were :-
Stowmarket, Ipswich x 2, Hadleigh, Bury x 2, Colchester, Felixstowe, Woodbridge and Southwold, all from Suffolk, West Norfolk, Diss and Lowestoft/Yarmouth from Norfolk, Cambridge and Ely from Cambs, and Westcliff, Braintree and Mavericks from Essex.

It was great to see Harwich combining with Felixstowe to form a combined side.

All clubs were drawn into 4 pools, before knock-out competitions at their resulting positions.
The 5th place competition was won by Lowestoft/Yarmouth who beat Felixstowe.
Fourth place was won by Hadleigh, beating Stowmarket; Third place was shared by Woodbridge and Ipswich. Cambridge defeated Colchester for Second place.
In the Trophy competition, the Cup was shared by Bury and Brentwood based Mavericks, who drew 5-5 in a pulsating final.
The competition was managed by 8 officials from the Suffolk & North East Essex Referee Society, who used it as on opportunity for referee development, with no less than 4 aged 16 or 17 !!

Ross Cowie, Chairman of Eastern Counties Club/Community Player Development Group commented “what a fantastic day of rugby; it was superb to see over 400 young players taking part in a flagship event; it was great to have 15 sides from Eastern Counties participating, a real testament to the work put in by so many in try to develop rugby at 16-18 in the 3 Counties – a huge thanks to Stowmarket for hosting a day with no incident or issues, a real advertisement for rugby’s core values.”