Chairman's address

As we reflect on the last year, Leixlip Utd can be rightly proud of the progress we continue to make.

Thanks to the sterling efforts of Austin Hutton and Conor Garry we received the FAI club Mark award. We are not prepared to rest on our laurels and Austin and Conor are pushing on to reach the next level.

We appointed Robbie Fay as our small sided games Director of Football this year and he has already made a big impact on both players and coaches. We hope to appoint a Director of Football for our academy section very soon.

Our recent mini Leagues was easily our biggest and most successful running of this event, now in its 48th year. The time and effort our mini Leagues committee put into this year's event could be seen in the way it ran so smoothly.

During the year we sadly lost some friends of our club.

In November we are very sad to learn of the sudden death of Brian Fitzmaurice (RIP). Brian was a great servant to our club as a manager, executive member and a former Chairman of the club from 1988 to 1993. Brian also served as Vice Chairman of the DDSL during the nineties and was instrumental in the creation of the small sided games in the DDSL where he served as secretary of that league.

In March we were shocked by the sudden passing of Mick Colgan (RIP). Mick worked on our CES scheme and is greatly missed.

Brendan Lawless (RIP) from River Forest sadly passed away last month. Brendan was a schoolboy referee in the DDSL for longer than I care to remember. Brendan was an ex-soldier and a nice man who refereed many a game in Leixlip including for myself as a schoolboy player and manager.

May they all rest in peace.

On the Football front unfortunately our senior 1 side suffered relegation. A combination of defections to other clubs and injuries to some key players didn't help our efforts to stay. With an influx of some players from our successful under 19 and 20 sides we can look forward to a much better season ahead.

Our schoolboy section continues to go from strength to strength despite the challenges from the national league. This past season we fielded teams in the A or Premier sections from under 10 to 16, an achievement which very few teams can match. We actually fielded 30 teams in the ddsl last season.

Our under 16 P1 side won their league and Cup. They actually only drew one game in the league.

Our under 18s finished runners up in both their league and Cup.

Our under 19s won their league and the under 20s won the LFA Plate Cup competition.

Our girls section continues to grow and last season for the first time we entered 4 teams in the ddsl girls league. These were under 8,9 and two teams at under 11. We also had 3 teams in the MGL Leagues, 14s, 16s and 18s. We are also fielding two senior ladies teams in EWL.

Along with the senior men's teams and our over 35 team we are putting 42 teams on the pitch this year. These numbers will almost certainly increase next season with teams coming out of our academy and the absolute explosion of girls playing.

While these are fantastic developments, they also present the Club with some difficulties. We hope to start the development of the new astro and resurface the existing astro in August. From start to finish this project could take 3/4 months to completion.

Home games and training will no doubt be very difficult to manage during this period. We are currently in the process of trying to obtain pitches in St.Catherines Park and Intel to help alleviate the pressure during the project.

We will also be requesting the ddsl, lsl and the mgl to give us as many away fixtures as possible during this period. More details on this will follow when we have more information.

As regards the astro project I must recognise the efforts of the committee and in particular Paula Flood and Dave Dolan in obtaining a Sports Capital grant of €120,000 towards the overall cost of the project. We will need to get a loan to help with the costs which will stretch to close on €600,000.

As you will see from the financial report we are in good health and we should be able to obtain a loan. There are still some obstacles to overcome before we can start this project but I am confident we can overcome them.

We will definitely have to increase registration fees this season but I would hope not too much. We had a very good Christmas draw last year and something similar this year would be very helpful.

In conclusion I wish to thank my fellow committee members for all their support and help during the past year. I most certainly wish to thank all our coaches and managers for all your efforts over the past season, this club would not exist at the level we are at without you. We are facing into a very exciting period in our history and with everyone pulling in the same direction we can achieve our goals.

Paul Martin