In September 2021 Pentland United F.C. approached the Scottish Football Partnership Trust seeking assistance to improve their home facility which is situated in the village of Dunnet, Caithness. The club – know as ‘The Stabbies’ play their football in the Caithness Amateur Football Association and had identified 2 priority projects that would help secure their long term sustainability at the same time as developing Ham Park into a more inclusive venue for football and other community activities.
Project 1 focused on the changing pavilion which had proudly served the club and community since it was constructed in the early 1980’s. Vice – Chair Michael Grey commented “The Pavilion was showing clear signs of degradation in terms of the windows and doors not only swelling and becoming difficult to operate but also decaying. A key priority of our club is to always maintain the high level of service we provide to users of the facility and for that to continue we had to re-establish the integrity of the building with modern windows and doors, ensuring we could maximise our energy efficiency at the same time as creating a comfortable, safe and secure environment for our players and community users.”
Project 2 focused on the club’s main pitch and looked at how a small infrastructure improvement could help increase participation levels at the same time as offering flexibility during park maintenance periods, and whilst hosting other community events. New mobile goalposts were identified as the missing piece of the jigsaw as they would enable the club to adapt the dimensions of the playing surface to accommodate inclusive participation opportunities for Youth, Para, girls’ and women and walking football groups, contributing to the health and wellbeing of the wider community. “With the new goals the park can now support any type of football and they will help us with the delivery of specific training session. The enhanced flexibility we now enjoy will open up a number of avenues for increased and more inclusive usage of Ham Park, which is exactly the direction the club wishes to travel. The secondary benefits of the moveable goals will help simplify and reduce our time spent on maintenance during the part of the year when grass is actively growing, and we will now be able to create more space when the park is being used for other purposes. We would like to offer our sincere thanks to the SFP Trust for providing funding support for both projects, which along with our local material suppliers Blargoans Ltd and specialist installation support from Sinclair windows has allowed us to revitalise our existing assets for the benefit of the local community and wider footballing fraternity in Caithness.” Michael Grey, Pentland United F.C.
