sportcanchangetheworld

SBN members see the power of sport first hand

2010-03-08T23:47:00.000-08:00

Last week I took a couple of the members of the Sport Business Network to see a major sporting event. No, it wasn't an England football match or a trip to Twickenham to be underwhelmed by our rugby team. Instead, we headed off into a tough estate in the suburbs of Maidstone, Kent to witness first hand the work that clubs like Charlton Athletic do in the community.

There is something intimidating about many of the estates in our green and pleasant land and when you see armchairs and fridges happily living in the front garden of some of the houses and groups of disaffected youths hanging around on street corners, you get a sense that things ain't quite right!

In the middle of this modern urban landscape a new school system has been conceived and my understanding is that a couple of less-than-successful schools are being reconstituted into a shiny new academy with an impressive new building. Now, I am not going to get involved in politics and, like most of us, I don't have a clue whether this is a good thing or not, but what is evident is that a lot of kids in these schools are so disengaged that their future looks beyond hope, even as young teenagers.

Step forward Charlton Athletic Community Trust.

We arrived at a refitted old church hall in the Mangravet area of Maidstone and parked up in a back alley that you wouldn't want to be in after dark, especially as, just to add Gothic fantasy to the story, it nestled next to a graveyard. In the hall Freddie, a very impressive young Charlton coach, was working with 10 young people aged 15 and 16 years old. When I say working I mean it - Charlton have developed ingenious ways of using sport and the sporting context to help youngsters develop their literacy and numeracy skills and, best of all, it works. They work with kids who are in danger of being excluded from school and the objective is to help them get back onto the straight and narrow. As a "reward" for their efforts the youngsters get some free time to chill out or play football in the local park.

What amazed me was the fact that the chill-out time was hardly high tech. Fredddie escorted them up to the park, rather like a caring sheep dog with a bunch of errant new lambs making sure they didn't make a bolt for it, where they all immediately headed for the swings and roundabouts!

Here was a bunch of youths that certain papers would describe as feral and out of control and they wanted to play on the roundabout. Now, I am not suggesting that these kids are angels but you do have to stop and think about their lives and what their experiences have been to date. Many of them never leave the estate, often with good reasons based on their own safety, and their world is frighteningly insular. As the Charlton Kent programme manager said, many of them wouldn't laugh again until the next Charlton session.

Of course not all of the kids in these estates are like this group. In fact the vast majority are diligent, hard working good people, but for some reason there will always be those who fall through the net and our society has to do something with them and organisations like Charlton are ideally placed to do this.

It is not conventional by any means, but convention doesn't always work. These kids are definitely benefitting from the Charlton programme and are starting to achieve things that they never dreamed they could. In fact Freddie himself came through a similar project with the Trust and you won't find many better success stories than him.

The real damage behind Terrygate

2010-02-12T03:22:00.000-08:00

So JT has apparently flown out to Dubai to see if he can fix his marriage. Well, good luck to him and his wife, I hope they emerge intact, because their marriage troubles really are none of our business and there is something really unsavoury in the way that we all pore over the salacious details in papers like the News of the World. That is his private life and whilst I wouldn't want him as a mate, I couldn't really care less about what he gets up to even if he was the England captain. Let he without sin and all that.
What I, and millions of right minded football fans across the country, find really appalling are the allegations that he offered his Wembley box for hire for £4,000 and a tour of Chelsea's training ground for £10,000. I mean what is that all about? The guy earns £170,000 a week, so why does he need to prostitute himself and sell other people's assets for, what to him, is peanuts? As for that garbage about it being for charity, I just don't buy that. If he wantedto give to charity he could log onto thousands of good causes on justgiving.com and do it with his own money.
The saddest thing about this whole affair is that, once again, one high profile individual has tarnished the reputation of English football. No matter that every week up and down the country there are hundreds of superb, self reliant and dedicated coaches working with kids in the roughest estates and schools. No matter that community schemes, like the one closest to my heart Charlton Athletic Community Trust ( and I am not even a fan of the football team), are literally saving young people's lives every day. No matter that the power of football unitestragic kids in Haiti with priviledged kids in Hampstead. No, the only thing that seems to matter is the selfish, ignorant and arrogant antics of people like John Terry.
There is much debate about whether these young players should be role models for kids and there are convincing arguments either way, but the fact of the matter is that they should watch their behaviour for their own reasons - they need the game to be in good health - on and off the pitch - or the money will head south and the gravy train will be over. If John Terry was a brand manager he would have been banished immediately. But above all the sad thing is that the millions of brilliant things that go on in football in the community are completely undermined by his actions. That is what we should be angry with him for and leave his wife to be angry at him for his private life.

Rugby League in the heart of the City

2010-01-25T00:44:00.000-08:00

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a sporting event that I would never have thought I would see - yes, Rugby League, that most cloth-capped and whippet racing of northern sports ventured into that most anachronistic of City institutions, the Honorable Artillery Company ground in City Road.

Why? Well it was the annual season curtain raiser match between the very professional Harlequins RL team and the aspirant, but obviously semi professional London Scholars, a team with its base in the unlikely rugby league area of Tottenham. The match is the brain child of Hector McNeil, sales and marketing director of ETF Securities, former serious RL player himself and the boss man of the Scholars. And what a great idea. One of the most powerful attributes of sport its ability to break down all sorts of social barriers and if rugby league is accepted - and enjoyed by a big crowd of City boys too - in London's most upmarket square mile then it, like most sports, has the potential to flourish anywhere. The match itself was as one sided as you would expect. When professionals take on gallant amateurs at anything they tend to win convincingly and Quins romped home but that is not the point.
This day worked really well on many levels. For Quins it was a decent work out, for the Scholars it enabled committed and skillful amateurs to see how hard they have to work to match the pros and for a bunch of primary school children from Claygate in Surrey it was a great day out in London with a medal around their necks from the warm up match. Now, quite what a posh village primary school was doing watching this game I don't know ( I overheard one little chap telling his mate that the previous Friday night his mum and dad had witnessed Ronnie Wood and his teenage Russian lover, having a total ding dong outside of the village pub, so they are clearly as exposed to the underclasses as their more urban competitors from a school in London!) but they were there and they seemed to love every minute. They did pay more attention to the game than many of the local audience who did seem more intent on discussing the price of gilts and the like but that doesn't matter.
What was clear to me was that Hector and his colleagues at the Scholars have opened up a new sporting avenue to many people from a football dominated area of London and lets hope that they achieve their ambition of being the Capital's second Super League "franchise" - although let's try not to use that term guys - so that the game develops further. The more opportunities we create for youngsters to try different sports the better. Not everyone wants to play football and in that area of London rugby union is not widely available or understood. It was encouraging that so many of the City's great and the good came out to support the teams, helping to raise money and awareness of a fantastic grassroots club that has loftier ambitions. Lets hope that more of these seemingly odd sporting events take place in unlikley venues this year.

YIP Hooray at Charlton

2009-12-14T01:25:00.000-08:00

I was delighted to be invited up to the Valley last week to hear the latest good news story that keeps flooding out of the Charlton Athletic Community Trust. It was a launch event for the results from their Youth Impact Programme (YIP) which is all about getting young people who are classified as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) back onto the straight and narrow. I know, those in authority love their acronyms but behind the rhetoric this stuff is really, really impressive.

Paul Elliott, former professional player, CACT trustee and member of the 2018 world cup bid team, led the proceedings and Ed Balls, minister for a whole heap of things including families, was on hand to give the whole thing a seal of approval from the government. Once the dignitaries had done their bit the true story emerged and it is simply outstanding. The Charlton guys get a bunch of NEETs out if their structureless lives and into a programme which includes sport participation and education. Now, whether your politics are of the right wing show-them-no-mercy type or left wing its-not-their-fault-lets-give-them-loads-of-state-benefits variety, one thing is certain and that is these kids are not adding any value to society or their own lives and it is surely better all round if they are encouraged to re-engage with mainstream society.

And what success stories they’ve got! There were two young lads who stood up and spoke so confidently and eloquently that you would think they had been educated at one of the UK’s best schools. Of course they hadn’t and it is a fair assumption to make that these guys have not had easy lives. Of course no one forces kids to run with the gangs (well, they do actually but lets not get into that right now) or drop out of society but the fact is they do and Charlton’s programme has converted loads of them back into being what they always could have been – reasonable, mature, self confident young people who are now very definitely NOT NEETs! These guys have jobs, are back in education and are real role models for others and meeting them and the people who help them to get their lives back on track is a real privilege.

The SBN brand essence is built on Mandela’s words that “Sport can change the world”. When you meet the guys from CACT and the kids they work with, you know it is true.