Event: Gateball Promotion and Tournament in the U.K.
Date: August 19th - 21st, 2014
Venue: Ripon Spa Hotel , Ripon city, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom
First official gateball promotion event was held successfully in the United Kingdom with more than 30 participants!
(This event was very global! Gateball players from Swiss, Belgium and Japan gathered for this promotion event)
Participants came not only from the locals but also from cities around (good point of helding an event at a hotel, able to attend the tourists and guests too).
The hotel had a wonderful garden and courts which is also used for croquet games.
3 day event started with an introduction of explaining "what is gateball?", showing a demdonstration game, and then started practicing in each court.
Practice lessons were...
1) swing straight and pass the first gate
2) touching other balls
3) sparking other balls
4) start a game by yourself and count how many shots needed to get to the agari gole pole.
after catching up the basic of gateball by the 4 practices above, it's time to start playing the actual game!
We played many practice games as much as the time allows, and it was great to see many people loving and enjoying the game.
On the last day, we had a "real game" going on.
The participants were devided into 4 teams, and played a round robin game twice (6 games in total).
4 Japanese players who came to promote has done the captain/managing of the game.
Many participants were not only enjoying but also was very serious about how the game will go and to the results of the game.
I could see some players discussing about how they should put their ball on their second shot.
This was a big surprise for me. This really shows that our promotion was a success because they were really into it within this three days.
(Talking about taktics are difficult for beginners)
Gateball in the United Kingdom has just started, but this first step is very important.
We believe this first step became a big step and hoping that the participants who enjoyed playing gateball here will start inviting their friends and start playing often.
In the future, we hope that this place can be not only the place where gateball players in U.K. but also players around European countries gather and make a group or hold games in the future.
Thank you especially to Ms. Sammy and Mr. Stuart from Ripon, Mr. David from Geneva and Mr. Bernard from Belgium for organizing and helping out.
This event could not happen without any of you!
September 1st, 2014
|
