The purpose of The Scottish Football Partnership’s Growing the Game Award is to assist Scottish FA Quality Mark clubs add one new team to their playing membership. The funding provided assists with the start-up cost of a new team and is delivered in conjunction with the Regional Football Development staff. This ambitious pilot project aims to create 60 new Grassroots teams during the 2014/15 season.
Edinburgh South F.C. (South East)
2006 age group
30 new players created
8 coaches
7 -v- 7 format of the game
On receiving the award, Kelvin Hurd, Treasurer of Edinburgh South F.C. said “On behalf of the club, can we please record a huge thank you to The Scottish Football Partnership for its support generally and specifically for the recently awarded Growing the Game award. Our club is based in the Inch area of South Edinburgh and its immediate catchment contains a number of the more deprived areas within the capital. Without the support of organisations such as the SFP, we would quite simply struggle to survive, whereas the club is currently thriving. We consider ourselves an inclusive development/family club and have no intention of emulating some of the supposed performance teams but the downside of that is that parents, particularly of older teams, are often less involved.
We now have 25 teams and anticipate 30 in August and quite realistically 40 by August 2016 with the new 7’s teams and our expansion into girls football which starts in earnest very soon with our first open session – interest has already been significantly greater than expected so we have good reason to be optimistic. To accomplish this without access to a 3G surface is a major achievement as winter training is by far our biggest issue. We even propose to start new U-17,19 and 21 teams next season. The Growing the Game award was used to start 4 x2006 teams who are all now firmly established within the ESSDA 7-a-side network and that, combined with our own fundraising efforts, enabled the boys to start on the front foot with all registration fees paid, new kit and fully equipped training sessions. The enthusiasm of the children, and to be fair the parents too, at that age group regularly restores the enthusiasm of some of our more jaded and cynical senior coaches and officials – just a few minutes watching them makes you remember why you do it!”