The Republic of Ireland Ladies Snooker Association has reached a new milestone in membership, now stands at 700 since promotions began back in 2014. We have introduced many initiatives and brought cue sports to a wider audience via our schools in establishing many new events to cater for all levels within the sport.
While we are delighted with the success of our pathway plan over the past 7 years, we are still relatively young in our advancement of playing levels, that will certainly progress quickly in the future due to the establishment of an academy at Sharkx Newbridge with a plan to extend this initiative in the near future.
Out of the 700 members to date, a total of 398 have participated on our main tour making for almost 57% of those joined who played on the tour. 36% of our membership have participated on the National Intermediate tour while 90 girls have participated in our National Special Needs events with many also playing at County Championships and the U21 National Championships over the years.
Our National Primary Schools programme has seen some 160 young girls participate in the National Primary School events with some progressing to the main and intermediate tours.
We are very hopeful that we will see much more participation in cue sports among young girls in the years ahead. Covid-19 has certainly stopped events over the past two seasons but we will once again get these events back on our calendar when the situation allows.
Just between August and the end of October 2021 we took in 30 new members with 18 of these playing on the RILSA tour and we hope to see the remaining new members on the tour soon. Our promotions at the Home Rule Club in Kilkenny has 6 new female players getting together every Monday evening to practice and ready themselves to participate on the RILSA tour in 2022.
