First of all, we hear again from Luke Shearing, Inclusion & Cohesion Officer with the Foundation – if you haven’t seen his first instalment click here to catch up before checking out his new diary below.
LUKE’S DIARY
Hello and welcome to my second Foundation diary.
With the roadmap now in place from the Prime Minister about how things are hopefully moving in a better direction I, like everyone else, cannot wait to get back to a sense of normality and more importantly back to regular face to face delivery across our programmes.
It seems like a long time ago now but when the Prime Minister announced on the 4th of January that we were heading back into a full national lockdown, any sort of normality seemed a long way off.
However, as you know, just because we are in the middle of another lockdown it doesn’t mean we have stopped engaging with our participants. We continue to run regular online sessions across all of our inclusion and cohesion projects, starting with our Wolves Disability teams who meet via zoom every Wednesday evening.
These Zoom calls cover a range of different topics to make sure our players remain safe and well as well as giving them an opportunity to learn and progress. The players have taken part in workshops on internet safety and nutrition as well as a weekly workout to make sure they are match fit and ready to go when required.
As I have mentioned previously, the PL Kicks project is for all young people aged 8-18 to join in, socialise and play football. One key part of this is our Girls Hub and so we organised a three part online series called ‘Empowering Girls in Football.’
These online and interactive sessions are designed to keep our Girls Hub participants engaged throughout the lockdown but also to encourage new participants to come along and see what we are about.
For the the first of this series we were delighted to be joined by Wolves Women captain and Foundation ambassador Anna Price who spoke brilliantly about her journey in football and also answered lots of questions from the 81 girls who signed up the event.
We were then also delighted to be joined by former Wolves Foundation employee and England international Emily Westwood who also answered questions and led a workout session for our participants which they thoroughly enjoyed.
Meanwhile, 12 months ago if you’d have asked me what a Rocket League was I’d have looked at you with bemusement! However, the last year has opened up my eyes to the world of eSports, in particular the game Rocket League which proves to be very popular amongst our regular PL Kicks participants.
We have taken this on board and recently held a Rocket League masterclass on Zoom with over 50 young people tuned in. We were extremely lucky to be joined by eSports professionals and official Wolves Rocket League team members Rix Ronday and Juicy who took part in a Q&A with our participants before sharing their key hints and tips to become a Rocket League Champion.
I can’t thank Rix and Juicy enough for joining us and I found it fascinating to hear all about the life of a professional eSports player, something I didn’t even know existed just 12 short months ago. Following on from the masterclass we also organised a Rocket League tournament across both Xbox and Playstation where the winners had the chance to play a game against Rix!
As an Inclusion and Cohesion team we are now busy planning the next stages of our delivery which it looks like is going to involve some face to face delivery. I know I speak for all of my team when I say we can’t wait to get out on the pitches again and engaging with the young people of the city on a regular basis.
I’d like to end this piece talking about something that typifies everything it means to work for the Wolves Foundation. In recent weeks it has been fantastic to be involved in the Feed our Pack initiative, helping to pack and deliver over 250 food parcels to the children of Wolverhampton during February half term. It’s so fulfilling to see so many people working so hard together across the Foundation, club and fans to help those that need it most. Feed our Pack is the perfect example of the ‘Stronger Together’ attitude of the club and city, from Nuno’s extremely generous donation to Conor Coady and the club’s under 18’s squad helping to pack the parcels - we really are one pack.
Thank you for reading my latest entry into the diary series, stay safe and I hope to see you all soon.
