A year on from what was crowned the 2024-25 Victorian Athletic League event of the year, the SRC committee delivered another brilliant spectacle on Saturday, drawing a huge number of athlete entries and spectators alike to Kings Park for the 2025 Seymour Club Gift.
Defying a power outage that threatened to spoil the festivities, the club exceeded crowd and athlete numbers from 12 months ago, while maintaining the atmosphere that was so well received at VAL level last year.
SRC president Blair Collins was overjoyed with the event, which was hailed a huge success in each and every aspect.
“It’s been outstanding, really,” Collins said.
“You know, we had 600 entries, as we said here the other day, from just about every state.
“The power went off today in half of Seymour. We managed to find some generators and get the power back up within 25 minutes, so we didn’t lose any time, which was fantastic, we had some back-ups.
“But, mate, the crowd, I think we had a bigger crowd than last year. There’s more people in our VIP area, probably more people in the ‘get set, go’ area.
“For the Kelfit crew, to be honest, I think we had four winners, (four) seconds and a third, so you can’t beat that. It was a fantastic day for us.”
Perhaps the most telling indicator of success, however, came not when any Kelfit athlete took the top step of the podium.
Every time a non-local athlete accepted their winner’s sash on Saturday, they acknowledged the local athletics group in their few words of thanks, citing its sportsmanship and friendly nature and often underscoring the quality of the Seymour Gift as the highlight of the VAL calendar.
“Yeah, it is (very validating to hear),” Collins said of the remarks from visiting athletes.
“From my point of view, I think there’s about 23 events in the VAL, and our surface, I think, is number one. I might be biased, but I think it’s number one.
“I think we bring atmosphere. A lot of other events don’t really bring that. Our community gets behind it, so that does validate it.
“The Kelfit crew is one of the most friendly crews going around, to be honest, so I think we’ve got respect within the VAL itself. And that’s all part of it, I suppose, we’re good people.”
Many attendees would have missed the 12 people forming a huddle just behind the podium as the gift wound down at the weekend, but without them the event likely wouldn’t have even taken place.
While Collins had many thanks to give, including the “unbelievable” 68 event partner sponsors and major sponsor Seymour Club, he saved special mention for the SRC committee, the 12-strong group that worked tirelessly behind the scenes for the past year to elevate the event yet again.
“We’ve got 12 people in the committee and everyone does their part,” he said.
“The beauty of our committee, nobody takes the fence when somebody brings up an idea, so if half the committee don’t like it, you know, we’re all invested in what we do.
“I suppose from that point of view, we just function really well. We’ve all got our own little things we do.
“We’ve got a little subcommittee set up, sponsorship committee, finance committee, VAL committee, so everybody sticks to their lane.
“We can delegate stuff. We were down here probably for five hours yesterday and we had a few little hiccups with some of our stuff not tuning up on time, but everybody just didn’t groan … we just move on to the next thing.
“So, you know, for me, as president, I probably get to talk about it and get to stand up and do the speeches, but at the end of the day, it couldn’t be possible without our committee.”
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