Last night (Monday 30th October) saw the first round of this season’s Rosebowl Competition.

As a reminder, the Rosebowl is an all PDI competition with 3 rounds where clubs submit 15 images each and compete against different clubs in each round. All rounds are held on Zoom but can be hybrid.

Clubs are awarded points according to their position in each of the three rounds, these points are totalled once all rounds have been completed and the top 12 clubs in the competition are invited to compete in the Rosebowl Final. In each round two starred images are awarded by the judge and these starred images also go into a separate Starred Image Final.

Woodley CC were our hosts last night and skilfully navigated the competition as a hybrid with Woodley members in the hall and our judge Julia Cleaver and approximately 30 club members on Zoom.

With Zoom competitions it is essential that the judge receives the images prior to the competition (without club and author details) so that he/she can evaluate the images without having to worry about unstable internet connections on the night. In this case it appeared that Julia had also pre-scored the images to help speed things along.
Her observations were mostly excellent with, as always the case in external competitions, one or two puzzling comments and suggestions.

Ealing’s top scorers with 20 were:

Catherine Wheel by Paul Mason
On Balance by Shaun Hodge which also scored one of the two awarded stars.

We didn’t get any 19’s but the following images scored 18:

Eastern Eyes by Dennis Durack
First Light by Shaun Hodge
The Green Rock by Amanda Wright
Yohoi by Paul Mason
Tokyo By Night by Jenny Fenton

With 33% of the images scoring 17 and 25% scoring 18 and 11 images held back to be scored at the end it was hard to call who the winners were going to be and final scores were not surprisingly incredibly close:

1st Marlow CC           265
2nd EHHPS                 264
3rd Woodley PC          262
4th Kidlington CCPG 254

The two starred images on the night were

On Balance by Shaun Hodge EHHPS
Dancing In Winter’s Light by Robin Dodd of Marlow

Well done all.

Our next round will be hosted by Northfields CC on 16th January where we will also do battle with Stoke Poges and Croxley.

(Amanda Wright)