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The West Yorkshire Track & Field League

The League was set up in 1968 by Granville Beckett, then Hon. Secretary of Huddersfield's Longwood Harriers and later North of England AA Secretary.

The idea came following visits to Manchester, where Roger Colson had made the most of the new facilities at Stretford's Longford Park to form the Stretford Track League. Beckett felt that there was room for a similar league on this side of the Pennines.

There were no synthetic tracks in Yorkshire in those days and the first season in the league saw a dozen fixtures held at various venues, including grass tracks, so that each club in the organisation could host a fixture. Tracks used included Temple Newsam, Leeds, Leeds Road, Huddersfield, Marley Stadium, Keighley, Horsfall Playing Fields, Bradford and grass tracks at Holmfirth High School, and Spring Hall, Halifax. Some 700 athletes of all age groups joined the league, and they were issued with a season's fixture card and a number.

Bob Smith of Bingley Harriers, was elected the League's first president at a general meeting at Huddersfield YMCA and Wakefield's Doug Bedford, later to become league president himself, presented two trophies for annual competition.

West Yorkshire Championships for various track events were allocated to various meetings and provided a main event for each fixture. In recent years a West Yorkshire League Championships was held as a separate event at the end of the season, with its own set of medals awarded. The Championships event was also used to present the medals to all the individual league winners.

The league was seen as a bridge to the gulf between school and club competition and it is pleasing to see the league still flourishing in this respect more than 50 years after its formation. This is largely due to the efforts of Gordon Agar of Skyrac AC, who has given more than 40 years of dedicated service to the league, and he has been the main driving force of the league in recent years.