Proud to Play organiser, Craig Watson is praising Auckland Pride for it’s inclusion of sport in this year’s festival. “New Zealand is a large sporting nation and to finally have that well represented in a Pride festival made the whole festival feel like a better and fuller representative of our community,” says Watson. “For our guest and athletes, they were then able to go to movies, theatre production, dance parties, The Big Gay Out and Bear events as well have participate in sports. Even the parade with it’s protests added to the whole experience and showed Auckland, the rainbow community and Proud to Play off as a diverse, strong and powerful community.” Proud to Play was born after it was announced in August that the board of the 4th Asia Pacific Outgames was withdrawing from the organising the event, just months before the games were due to begin. Watson says; “Any international event can take years to organise – sponsorship, funding and promotion all takes time and many months of investment. For an event like Proud to Play, which started planning in September 2015, not just from ‘the ground level’ but also handling the uncertainty left by the Outgames failure, the two main organisers myself and Dion Leslie had our work cut out for us if we were going to pull this event off in the time we had.” “How do I know I the event was a success? – Well the very fact that we had over 450 athletes, representing 6 countries and playing 10 sports – I think in itself was a success,” says Watson. “But then to see people from all ages competing and winning, to see so many different nationalities
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Friday, 26th February 2016 - 3:39pm