Irish Masters 2010

Another weekend, another event. Nicola and Sam made their way to their respective airports late on Thursday night to arrive into Ireland with enough time to prepare everything that needed preparing for the Irish Masters 2010.

Held in the beautiful Park Hotel, Dundalk, the event was bound to be an exciting one with World Dance Masters' biggest registration of the year so far. Over 220 dancers had registered to compete. The only thing about this bothering the Masters Team was how they were going to manage to get through all the heats in just one day!

Saturday morning arrived quickly enough and Nicola and Sam were up early to make sure all things were in order. On Friday evening Tommy Weafer arrived to set-up for being our fabulous DJ for the day and the Park Hotel staff worked through the night to ensure the venue ballroom was set-up according to our meticulous specifications! All was ready to go and our nerves were calm.....until we saw the queue waiting to come in!!!

The next mission was getting everyone through the door and registered as quickly as possible with thanks to Jason Hill. Job done in 30 minutes, on schedule, even though Sam had lost a good clump on his hair though the stress of having to calculate everyones entry in his head! By 10:30 the hall was packed and we were ready to kick-off with the Pro-Am competition. Our first congratulation goes to our Pros; James McLauchlan, Lee Easton, Fred Whitehouse, Sam Robins and Shane McKeever danced tirelessly for almost 1hr 30mins to get all of our Pro-Am heats done on schedule. What a job they did.

After a very quick two song break our floor co-ordinators Elaine Fox , Jason Hill, Rosita Shekelton and Sharon Kennedy, along with MC Damien Brady, had got all the dancers competing in the heats ready to go. Our judges for the day (Nicola Lafferty, Lee Easton, James McLauchlan, Ann Cunningham and apprentice judges Fred Whithouse, Paul Culshaw and Bernie Lenaghan) were ready to rock and so on came our first heat of Newcomer Juniors. What a performance they all gave. This followed with our other heats in the relative divisions. Placed in between these preliminaries was our newest division - Starter. Over 30 dancers competed in this new One Dance division and oh my, did they get some support from the 300 strong audience. The Starter scoring was produced quickly by our scorer Sam Robins and the Starter awards were done by the end of the heats. Congratulations to all the Starter dancers - you were magnificent and we hope you all come back and compete again. Everyone else, watch out for the new Starter Division next year and get some people rallied up to compete. One dance, three divisions, offered at every competition concluding at Worlds 2011!

At 3:30 we were finally ready to start our Finals. A little late in the day but the time flew by. Thank you to all our amazing staff for their organisation and the wonderful competitors for being ready to go whenever we called them. This was by far the most tense schedule we have ever run and by 19:00 we were ready for all the trophies to be awarded. Now that is called super efficiency!

Finally at 20:00 we started our evening social (Sam disappeared to go and catch up on the England football match for a brief 30 minutes). DJ'd by Tommy Weafer and our very own Nicola Lafferty, everybody enjoyed a wonderful evening of dancing and relaxing until.....well, 03:00!!

And that concluded the Irish Masters 2010. Once again, thank you to EVERYONE for the unbelievable support. Thank you to the Park Hotel for helping make everything run smoothly and a special thank you to Elaine Fox, Sharon Kennedy, Jason Hill, Rosita Shekelton, Damien Brady, Tommy Weafer, David Fiddis, David Marsh, Paul Culshaw, Lee Easton, Ann Cunningham, Fred Whitehouse, Bernie Lenaghan and Gail Cowie (temporary photographer while Sam was too busy!) for all their help and support throughout the day.

For all those coming to Worlds, see you there. For all those not, we hope to see you at the Irish Challenge, 4th September 2010 in Ty Holland!