Naas RFC U-7's Proud recipients of the 10th Kieran Burke Festival of Rugby Trophy
Sunday February 23rd saw De La Salle Palmerston's home ground, Kirwan Park, host the 10th annual Kieran Burke Festival of Rugby. Over the 10 festival's to date, it is estimated that there has been over 10,000 children have participated in this unique event that is the largest of it's kind for any sport that caters for this age group nationally.
This year over 840 Boys and Girls aged Under-7(70 different squads)from 29 different clubs throughout Leinster took part, with close to 2,000 proud parents and spectators cheering them on proudly played as they player on the 16 acre site, most of whom were excitedly taking place in their first ever festival of rugby.
And what excitement they had in store as they made new friends from other clubs from all over Leinster and also got to meet Leinster and Ireland players Luke Fitzgerald (who himself began his rugby career at DLSP mini rugby on a Sunday morning, Andrew Goodman and Michael Bent who all excelled as ambassadors for Leinster at the event by signing autographs and posing for photos with the future stars of Leinster and, hopefully, Irish Rugby!
Another proud link to the tournament was that Kieran’s dad Karl is last year's President of De La Salle Palmerston and he proudly oversaw the whole event and took great pride in preventing the Kieran Burke trophy to Naas RFC who were selected as deserving recipients.
An event of this magnitude takes a considerable amount of organising and DLSP FC would like to thank a number of key people who have been instrumental to the success of the event year on year: The Burke Family, Michael Nugent, David Hicks, John Corr, Stephen Gore of Leinster Rugby, Ian Caey and all the members of DLSP involved in pitch marking, traffic management etc, and most importantly all the participants. Till next year, which will proudly be the events 11th anniversary!
We would also like to thank "The Salmo Snapper" (aka fellow DLSP club member Paul Allen) for once again providing his services Free of Charge to take excellent quality photo's of the festival, he has also very kindly shared his photo's to be viewed through the following link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlsp/sets/72157641433431274/page2/