The Illawarra’s athletes have performed admirably at the NSW Little Athletics Relay Championships, with teams from a number of clubs winning medals.
Wollongong City picked up three medals, with the under 15 girls winning the 4x100 relay in an impressive time of 50.18. The team featuring Grace Adams, Hannah Crinnion, Alyssa Parks and Janna Hadaya defeated a talented Hills District team that entered the event as defending champions.
Tim Crinnion from the club said it was a fantastic achievement given the strength of their opposition.
“The Wollongong team hasn’t won a gold medal before and the team that came second have been the top team for a couple of years.” Crinnion said. “So it was good to get a first place against some pretty tough competition. All the girls ran really well and were at the top of their game.”
The club also won silver in the under 12 girls 4x100m and under 13 girls 4x100m relays.
The under 12 girls team was led by talented sprinter Chelsea Ezeoke and included Emma Walsh, Samara Jirsa and Cailee Melfi. Ezeoke recently won two gold medals at the NSW PSSA athletics championships and will fly to Adelaide in early December for the 2017 Pacific School Games.
The under 13 girls team featured Jess Quilter-Jones, Ashlyn Adams, Kailee Moore and Kalia Spencer and finished second in a time of 52.80, just behind Inner West Little Athletics Club.
Overall, Crinnion said the athletes were deserving of their achievements on what was an enjoyable weekend.
“The kids had a great time. They all had a smile on their face at the end of the day. They all practiced pretty hard with baton changing and that paid off. If you concentrate on the small details, it pays dividends.”
Athletes from Dapto also recorded impressive results, with the under 14 mixed 4x100m relay and under 12 mixed 4x100 relay teams collecting silver medals. The under mixed 17 team finished third in the 4x100m relay. Helensburgh also claimed gold in the under 11 mixed 4x100 relay.
Coles Little Athletics Australia acknowledges and pays respect to all traditional custodians of the lands of which we work, run, jump and throw throughout Australia. We pay respect to elders both past, present and emerging.
We are committed to a positive future for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and to honor their ongoing cultural and spiritual connections to this country and recognize the role and value of culture.
Little Athletics Australia
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to
