For two years, South West Suffolk SGO, Lisa Dalton, has also been promoting girls’ football as a Barclays Girls Football Schools Partnership Strategic Lead, training, leading and promoting girls’ football to schools across the South West Suffolk Area.

Lisa has tried a number of novel approaches to encourage girls, schools and community clubs to work together.  As a result of this work, earlier this year she was nominated for an award for Outstanding Use of Innovation; the awards ceremony was held at St George’s Park, the home of England Football and the FA on Monday 30th September.

From all the nominations, there were two finalists, one to be Highly Commended and one the Winner.

Lisa identified early on some of the challenges and barriers to football faced by girls and worked to find ways to break these down.  The 1st was a lack of studs; most grounds used for tournaments, competitions and festivals require studs to be worn, meaning a great number of girls are automatically excluded from joining in.

First stop was the internet, which highlight Football Rebooted, a charity sponsored by Utilita Energy, Helping Britain rehome pre-loved football boots.  With their kind initial donation of over 30 pairs of child sized boots and cooperation with primary schools, this led to schools collecting their own boots and creating boot libraries; a stock of sizes of shoes that girls can use once or twice, change their mind and hand them back, or swap them for a larger size when they grow out of them.

Once they had boots, the girls could attend competitions and exit routes, but for many, the thought of joining a community club was anxiety inducing, so Lisa invited coaches from local clubs to come along to the competitions to show their faces, introduce themselves and create that much needed link.  One local club, Cornard Dynamos, recruited a number of girls the very first session after and more have continued to join as they had friends already in place, plus at least parent has started their coaching journey to support his daughter’s team.

And then, girls need regular opportunities to get involved.  After training over 20 girls at Thomas Gainsborough School, Lisa and the students created a girls after school football club, free to attend and creating friendships, support and a window for year six girls to build the confidence when the time for transition to year seven begins.

The first year six to transition has returned to the club each week to play, start her coaching journey and, with support from the leaders, joined the school club/team too.

In the category of Outstanding use of Innovation, Lisa and James Grant (Vandyke Upper School) were announced and Lisa was more than delighted to receive her winner’s trophy from BBC Sports presenter, Clare Balding, who specifically asked about the Boot Libraries during the presentation and this was, again, mentioned by Baroness Sue Campbell during the keynote speech at the conference the following morning.
 

The video below highlights the work that the team at TGS have been doing to promote girls football at TGS.

Well done to the girls wo have been the regular Wednesday after school coaches; they have made a huge different to the lives of girls in the area.

Click on the photo below to play.