Blackpool FC Community Trust column: Good work undertaken but farewell to a club stalwart

It has seen 35 young people, who have recently left secondary school, engage in social action activity and plan programmes they will deliver to support their local communities.

Some of the ideas from the young people have been quite innovative, including a ‘Keep Our Beaches Clean’ campaign and also a football coaching scheme for youngsters.

Some of the lads that have been practicing their coaching sessions have shown great potential and we may have some future staff in the group, which is always a primary objective for us – to build job opportunities and our future workforce.

We’ve been really lucky that we have been able to deliver this provision as a face-to-face programme, as many clubs in the North West have had to revert to digital delivery due to local lockdowns.

Our education team has also been busy making preparations for the new academic year.

Officers have been working up new schemes of work for our BTEC Level Two and Three qualifications in sports coaching, due to the new BTEC Specs for the new academic year.

The new units and delivery look really exciting, and put together with the reintroduction of our EFL CEFA national-11 a-side league, we still believe our BFC Sports College is the best option for young people looking to progress their post-16 education in sport and leisure.

I also had the pleasure of attending our BFC Walking Football Committee meeting on Thursday.

It was great to help bring people together to catch up, even though we had to give the terrible news that we cannot relaunch our provision until mid-September, because our facility hosts will not open their pitches until this time. We’re ready to go, but we’re a little reliant on others in this situation.

What this period has highlighted is our reliance on others when it comes to facilities, and while I was working on plans for the future long before Covid-19, it has intensified this area of development and hopefully we can announce some very exciting plans soon.

We have some grand plans and significant support locally, regionally and nationally to put them in place.

At the start of lockdown the Trust was probably the only section of the club that was still able to be front-facing and delivering some form of our objectives.

It’s great to now see the first team back in training and working hard for the new season, as well as the youth team and most of the football club staff back working hard across the board.

There has been an awful lot of investment and work going on in the background and significant changes around the stadium.

It was also exciting to see season tickets go on sale, and from reports I’ve seen, it’s great to see the community continue to back the club in such a difficult period.

This past week also saw us have to make an award in some unusual circumstances.

Normally we present our PFA Community Champion award at the end-of-season awards, but with lockdown striking and no physical contact with the players, we had planned to do something at the first game back in the new season.

I then received a knock on my office door on Thursday from Nathan Delfouneso, who has been extremely active in our community and been an amazing help to us.

He was there to say goodbye and make me aware he was moving on to Bolton Wanderers.

We obviously had a chat about this and I then had no choice but to present him with our trophy and have a little two-person ceremony at the side of the pitch for our 2020 Community Champion – the third consecutive year he has won the award.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Delf for all his contributions over the past few years and support in getting other players involved in visits and programmes.

He has truly been a credit to this football club and will be really missed by the Community Trust for years to come.

While a lot of our attention has been on reintroducing staff back to work, projects back into delivery and new developments, mine has been to assess the risk of Covid-19, whether or not a local lockdown could be implemented and what that would mean for the charity.

At the moment, it’s full steam ahead with staff working towards a ‘normal’ September, with programmes back in schools, education and employability taking place on site and community programmes back in place to support residents – we just hope it stays that way.