Pl & Sport England Fund Youth Sport Boost
Football could help encourage more young people try new sports after Sport England teamed up with the Premier League to announce a new £16.8m partnership to help encourage youth sports participation for the next three years.
The equally funded investment will see Premier League 4 Sport (PL4Sport) receive £3m a year, with its schemes expanded to include 12 Olympic, Paralympic and Commonwealth sports, and Kickz, which will help target an extra 30,000 people in disadvantaged areas through the rebranded programme, with an investment of £2.6m a year.
In addition, the PL4Sport deal will see 270 satellite sports clubs created, 1,500 volunteers trained and 2,500 sports qualifications obtained, while Kickz will train a further 3,000 volunteers and 600 competitions delivered.
The initiative is designed not only to introduce young people to sport but keep them engaged in it when they leave school.
Sports set to gain from the new partnership include golf, set to join the Olympic roster of sports in 2016, alongside athletics, boxing and tennis who join the eight existing Olympic and Paralympic sports already on offer.
The pull of the Premier League is expected to help attract youngsters to try StreetGolf (pictured) – the urban, play-anywhere version of the sport, pioneered by the Golf Foundation under its HSBC Golf Roots campaign.
Ten Premier League and Championship clubs have already opted to offer golf from September and, with presentations still to be made to other clubs, it is anticipated that more are likely to join them. The first football clubs to get into golf are Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Derby County, Everton, Hull, QPR, Southampton, Sunderland and West Bromwich Albion.
All coaching will be taken by PGA professionals and the satellite clubs which will be created will have links with their local golf clubs and their County Golf Partnerships, which work to grow the game.
Golf’s inclusion in PL4Sport has been welcomed by the England Golf Partnership, which brings together the amateur governing body, England Golf, and the Professional Golfers’ Association to increase participation, with the support of the Golf Foundation and Sport England Lottery Funding.
Brendon Pyle, the Golf Foundation’s development manager, said: ‘This is great news for golf because the power of football means we will be able to reach many more young people. And, because most football clubs are based in town and city areas, we’ll be able to reach a totally new audience.’
‘StreetGolf is the ideal way to introduce them to golf. It’s a different, edgy and versatile game which you can play anywhere. When we introduced it to the PL4Sport co-ordinators they loved it, it really changed their perception of how golf can be delivered.’
A pilot scheme run by the Golf Foundation and Bolton Wanderers FC has already proved successful, attracting more than twice as many young people as predicted. Brendon added: ‘We feel confident that through Premier League 4 Sport we will be able to reach more young people and demonstrate the positive life skills that the sport promotes.’
Figures released by Sport England on last month showed the number of people participating in sport at least once a week has fallen by 200,000. Some 15.3 million people played sport between April 2012 and April 2013, down from 15.5 million in October’s figures.
However, there are still 1.4 million more people playing sport than when London won the Olympic bid in 2005.
