It’s like the best carpet I’ve ever walked on.
It looks amazing and when you step onto it, it’s stunning under your feet.
We now have a new state-of-the-art pitch at the Pingle Academy and it’s only now that you realise how bad the old one was.
What it will do for us is allow us to use it in school time and also increase our bookings for evenings and weekends, which improves sporting participation for our wider local community which is exactly what we want to do.
Our pitch originally opened back in 2005 and has been well used since then, whether during the day as an academy or through the evenings and weekends as well, not just for our town but across South Derbyshire as we cover a wide area.
It had just reached the end of its life and needed replacing so we set about the process to get the funding and I have to say, the help is there!
We did it in partnership with South Derbyshire District Council, the Derbyshire FA and the Football Foundation and for me, as an enthusiastic amateur with these sort of things, it was the first time I’ve put in any kind of application on that kind of scale.
But I found that the help was always there throughout the process and it never felt at any point like I was asking too many questions to anybody at all.
However long it took, or when we thought we’d never get it finished, it’s all happened and the pitch is now there and that affects 1000s of people’s lives so it was all completely and utterly worth it.
If it’s another ten or 15 years before we have to do it again, how many people will have used the facility in that amount of time?
We’ve all got the same goal of increasing participation in sport and we found that the help is definitely there and people are listening.
