Football club nets £50k for own pitches

A football club in Eccleshall without a permanent home has scooped £50,000 towards creating a site for its 180 young players.

Eccleshall Eagles Junior Football Club applied for the money from Sport England. After succeeding in the bid work on the £250,000 project can now get under way in the summer, with extra funding secured from other sources.

It will see three new pitches created close to Drake Hall prison. The team currently has to play home games across eight rented sites and matches are regularly cancelled because of the poor standard of pitches.

Eccleshall Eagles Junior Football Club has 12 teams ranging from under-6 to under-17.

Jeremy Pert, community liaison officer for the club, said: "Clearly this is really exciting news for the club.

"We have been working on trying to get additional facilities over the last four or five years.

"At the moment the home games are at dispersed locations but this money means we can have one place.

"It will take 12 months to do, with work starting in the summer.

We will do some work to ensure the level of the pitches and put in some additional drains before reseeding the grass.

"This year we have just started a girls team – we will also probably add an under-18 team team next year.

"What we try to do at the football club is get the most out of each individual player for the level they play at," he added.

Other projects which benefit include Tamworth Rugby Union Football Club, which receives a total of £37,269 for developing a new training pitch with floodlights.

Richard Lewis, chair of Sport England, said: "These investments will transform the local pitches where many young people have their first experience of sport.

"With all of these playing fields safe from development for at least a generation, communities across the West Midlands can look forward to years of sporting enjoyment."