Wollongong City Little Athletics club continues to foster young athletics talent with 280 members kicking off the regular Friday night competition in a huge array of track and field events.
The club has enjoyed some outstanding results at state and regional championships in season 2016-17 beginning with a massive 22 track and field relay teams competing in the State Relays at Sydney Olympic Park.
The standout performances were third by the under 13 Mixed 4x400m team and third by the under 14 Girls’ 4x100m team.
The club then participated in the Regional Championships at Wagga Wagga and despite the extreme heat came home with an incredible 104 medals – 35 bronze, 23 silver and an impressive 46 gold medals. The club then reloaded to perform well at the State Multi Championships at Newcastle.
Special congratulations go to under 9s star Chelsy Wayne, who convincingly won her third consecutive State Multi Championship, while under 14s athlete Hannah Crinnion finished a fine equal second. The season finale was the State Championships at Sydney Olympic Park with WCLA delivering three state champions:
Rosie Tozer is the state champion in the under 15 Girls High Jump; Jett Link claimed the under 13 Boys 80 metre Hurdles state title and Nathan Henderson-Walls is the NSW champion in the under 13 Boys 3000m.
Among a number of other outstanding results was Jack McClatchie claiming two silver medals in the under 11s, 800m and 1500m; plus Chelsy Wayne winning a Silver medal in the under 9s Shotput and bronze in the Discus.
Jett Link represented NSW in U/13s at the Little Athletics National Titles and ran strongly to produce a personal best time and finish just behind the place-getters in a close final.
Another standout performance for the season was Rosie Tozer, who qualified for the National Athletics Titles and jumped a PB of 1.76m to win the National Championship.
The club also thanks 2016 Para Olympic Games, 800m Gold Medalist James Turner who was guest speaker at its presentation night. This year’s President’s Award went to under 15s athlete Austen Lantry. The club has a huge 2017/18 season ahead and will proudly host the Zone Championships, plus the Regional Championships on the new, state of the art “Blue Track” at Kerryn McCann Athletics Centre. WCLA acknowledge Wollongong City Council for providing Wollongong with a world class athletics venue.
The club is taking registrations for the new season from August 1, with details on Facebook or its website http://wcla.org.au/
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