Sophie Williams Blog

Start of the new season

I am now heading into my second season of full time training. Over the past year I have climbed to 4th in the Senior National Rankings and am hoping to improve on this again in the next year. We have a new training facility in Truro, which suits us perfectly, as it has a fencing salle with three pistes in it, our own lockers, an office and it also has a small gym and weights room. We still train at Truro School in the evenings, but we use the new venue as a full time facility in the weekday mornings.

Last weekend the Youth Sport Trust invited me to attend the Sainsbury’s UK School Games in Newcastle as a Champion Ambassador, which involved me shadowing the main Athlete Mentors over the course of the competition. It was a brilliant event and I met some very inspiring people and it was great to experience an event of that magnitude from another perspective. The UK School Games are run every year, with the inaugural one being held in Glasgow in 2006. I attended three UK School Games and came away with 5 gold medals and 1 bronze collectively. It was these results that resulted in me being appointed a Champion Ambassador and eventually be invited to the games this year. There were 13 athlete mentors (one for each sport in the games) and three Champion Ambassadors (one for judo, one for volleyball and myself for fencing). I learned some very valuable skills over the weekend and athlete mentoring is definitely something that I hope to pursue further.

My season starts again this weekend, with a domestic event in Stratford-upon-Avon, where I made a top 8 result last year. I am hoping to improve on this as it will give me a great start for the year ahead.