A brief history of Dundrum Special Olympics
09 May 2007

Dundrum SO was formed in late 2004 to carry on the good work and tremendous goodwill towards people with learning disabilities generated during Ireland's hosting of the Special Olympics World Games in 2003.

December 2004 saw the very first training session in UCD, and it's good to report that a number of the players from that day are still attending and playing for the Dundrum club.

In 2005, we organised our own series of friendly matches and hosted our own tournement where we invited teams from Dublin and Kildare. Our tournaments included teams from outside of the Special Olympics movement (teams from our volunteers' workplaces) , and our thanks to all teams who played in these matches with us.

Gradually our numbers have grown - we've lost some players to other sports and other attractions, but at present we're delighted to number about 20 players on our offical books.

In Febraury 2006 we held our overdue first birthday party, where we had the pleasure of the company of Paul McGrath and Ardhal O'Hanlon who took part in the training session and presented prizes to all club members later that morning.

October 2006 saw the start of our first official Special Olympics competition - a 5-a-side for teams in the Eastern Region. We were the only club to provide two teams, and we fulfilled all our matches. Our 'Blue' team won the entire competition, whilst our 'Gold' team performed well beyond even our own expectations and finished seventh overall. This competition was played out over the course of five days in four different locations, with at least three matches for each of our teams on each day.

In late April 2007, we were invited to play during half-time in the Eircom League match in Belfield between UCD and Longford. We played against Carmona Cougars, with no nerves being shown by any player in front of our largest ever crowd. The match finished 3:3 and hopefully we'll be back in to play again soon. Many thanks to UCD for hosting us that evening.

May 2007 - Club player (our only girl for now) Grace Jennings is chosen to travel to China in Sept/Oct this year to represent Ireland.

May 2007 sees the end of our second full season. Our training will stop for the summer, though we do expect to organise a series of friendly matches over the summer - players will be contacted.