ATHLETICS: VALE Royal Athletics Club are throwing their weight behind a plan for a £500,000 running track for Winsford.

Former international athlete Brian Hall has started a campaign not only for a six-lane track at Knight's Grange but for other facilities as part of a £1m scheme.

And it is high time Mid Cheshire had its own track, insists Vale Royal coach Shaun McGrath.

'We have got 300 members which makes us a major club in the borough, but we have got Cinderella facilities,' he said.

Hall's ambitious plan is the third to be launched in the past 10 years.

Vale Royal Borough Council adopted and then dropped one scheme and a new track was included in the abortive bid for National Lottery cash at the Hartford Campus.

But Hall believes it will be third time lucky.

'What we have got is a shale track at Knight's Grange and another at Hartford, and both are too dangerous to use for meetings. For an area the size of Vale Royal, it is simply not good enough,' he said.

Hall is a borough and town councillor and ran for England at the 1962 Commonwealth Games and for Great Britain at other major meets.

Now he has renewed his association with athletics via Vale Royal AC and his granddaughter Hannah Weedall who runs for the club.

McGrath added: 'A track would be tremendous for the club.

'We would have a permanent base with all the advantages that brings - the club would boom, the standard would increase and we would have a much better social side.

'John Lightfoot, our sprints coach, has to take his group all round the North West to find venues which will take our athletes - Wigan, Warrington, Crewe, Macclesfield - and it's the same with the jumps and throws. We have a triple jumper contesting the County Championships next week and he has got nowhere to train.

'While they are doing that, they cannot be concentrating on other members and have to limit the number they can coach.

'We have got one of the biggest memberships in the country for older teenagers, but there is massive potential to develop the Under 13s which we just have not been able to do.

'A permanent base would allow this club to grow to its potential.'

Hall predicted that with a new base at Knight's Grange, the Athletics Club membership would grow to 1,000 and even suggested Winsford United could leave Barton Stadium and join the Knight's Grange venture.

He said: 'My vision is for something exceptional, something for the whole community.'