Valkyers Rugby Festival
We start by congratulating the England Roses on their fantastic RWC win at Twickenham, this amazing team including Weybridge resident and regular club visitor Jess Breach are unbeaten in four years and absolutely deserved to be crowned World champions.

The day after the World Cup final we hosted our annual girls mini festival at Brownacres and was great to see the joy and enthusiasm of all the girls who took part.

It was also fitting that our under 16 Valkyries girls cluster coached by Jonny Clark also played their first ever game on our 1stXV pitch that day and were clearly inspired by the events at Twickenham the previous day and played some great running rugby to beat the Bruits cluster 43-12.

Congratulations to our U12 Valkyries who went unbeaten at the recent Guildfordians girls festival.

Past Presidents Lunch
Last weekend was one of those uniquely special Vandals weekends. On Saturday I hosted over 80 guests at our Past Presidents lunch, I was delighted that 6 of our 8 living Past Presidents were able to attend the lunch where we toasted the immense contribution that they all made to our club.

We also made a special presentation to Derek Seymour who was celebrating his 70th year as a Vandal.

A good crowd enjoying a beautiful autumn day watched the 1st XV put on a great display to beat KCS 52-10 and maintain their unbeaten start to the season.

Straight after the game we started a new club tradition by presenting specially made 100 league appearance caps to Harry “Redman”Reed, Wayne “the train” Mason and Karl “The Swede” Hoade. It was a very emotional presentation ceremony and hopefully these are the first on many such caps we present in the years ahead.

Mini Festival
On Sunday we hosted 80 teams and over 800 mini players to our legendary autumn mini festival. These is no better rugby venue than our island when the sun shines as it did on Sunday. A big well done and thank you to everyone involved in making our Autumn mini festival a big success. Brilliant job by Amos and his car parking crew.
A new sales record of £3.7k for the Braii boys bbq crew and our outdoor kitchen crew selling breakfast baps. Great job by our Cake stall and Sweet shop girls. A record Sunday for our Dirty Blond coffee crew. Most importantly we had over 800 very happy kids and visiting parents.

Finally congratulations to Aaron Collins our mini chair on his mini festival debut for putting in the hard yards to get everyone organized and make sure the festival ran smoothly which it did.

Senior Teams
At a senior level our 1st XV have made a strong start to the season with maximum points from our first three league games as we join Cobham, Hove and Trinity as the only teams left unbeaten after four rounds. Interestingly we take on all three of these unbeaten teams during the month of December but there is a lot of rugby to play before then starting this Saturday when we head away to Old Wimbledonians.

Our National cup second round game against our friends at Eastbourne RFC originally scheduled away at Eastbourne on Saturday 25th October had been rescheduled to be a league and cup game at home on Saturday 8th November following a request from Eastbourne to combine the two fixtures.

Our Super 2s have made a positive start to the season with a big win at home to Sutton & Epsom followed by a hard fought draw at home to London Irish and a narrow away defeat to London Irish last weekend.

On the pitch our colts have had a good start to the season despite missing skipper Max Bullett who is long term injured. The highlights so far have been a big away win at Farnham RFC which I was able to go and watch and a good home win on Sunday afternoon against Battersea Ironsides.

Referee Courses
On Saturday the club also hosted a high profile RFU referees course for coaches including 4 Vandals coaches who are now qualified refs. Without referees in rugby or umpires in Netball and Cricket we don’t have a game and all three sections would love it if more people stepped forward. ( please speak to one of our section chairs if you are interested or referee curious)

Whilst on the subject of referees I would also like to remind all our supporters that the referees who ref our league games at our level are Rugby volunteers and whilst strong vocal support to our players is appreciated any abuse directed towards the referee is not. We have worked hard in recent seasons to become a club that referees ( who all talk to each other) enjoy visiting and we want this to continue.

Safeguarding update
As always there is lots of great work going on in our junior section and our Valkyries. I’m delighted to report that we now have the dynamic duo of Sally Dodd (minis) and Jane Grist ( juniors) as our safeguarding officers. We also have Caroline O`Leary GP taking over 1st Aid at the club for mini and juniors. Caroline leads 1st aid courses as a GP and will be there to offer 1st aid advice to our mini/junior coaches. Thank you to Sally,Jane and Caroline for stepping into these crucial roles.