St Matthews Project gains an outstanding award

Hot on the heels of our last blog post on something excellent that is British, we're kicking off (!) October with another one.

This time, we're talking football.Specifically, the St Mattews Project in Tulse Hill. The project, and the award, are probably best introduced by information received from James Alexander, a Trustee of the Project:

"As a trustee of the St Matthews Project I (James) wanted to let you all know that on Thursday evening the St Matthews Project won the FA Charter Standard Club of the Year for London award and also the wider regional award.  This means that out of 4500 football based projects throughout London and the surrounding area the FA deemed the St Matthews Project as achieving the most over the past 12 months. As you can imagine this is an amazing achievement and is real recognition of the hard work Lee has put in over the past 10 years.

"This comes on the back of the project receiving the Ambition Quality Mark earlier in the year recognising the high standard of the projects policies and procedures. 

"For those who didn't know the breadth of the projects work, here is a snippet of what St Matthews offers our over 100 weekly participants

• Weekly parents play football for 3-4 year olds and their parent
• Weekly turn up and play sessions for ages 6-9, 9-12 and 16+
• Twice weekly team sessions (training and matches) for under 10, under 11s, under 13s, under 15s and under 16s
• Weekly girls football
• FA level 1 and 2 coaching courses
• NVQs in sports coaching

"Alongside this Lee and the coaches spend countless hours supporting the young people deal with family issues, liaising with schools and supporting young people navigate their way through adolescence. Personally I take great joy is seeing how the project has been able to employ a number of our ex players as coaches.  This Saturday for example over half of the coaches were ex players who have done their coaching qualifications with us and now work for the project.

"Well done Lee and everyone involved for your amazing achievement."

It is a real pleasure to share this sort of thing in this blog.

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