Delyn Recreational Gymnastics - Our Own Place

Who are we?

Delyn Recreational Gymnastics Club was founded in 2014. Its founders are a high school PE Teacher, a 5x60 School and Community Sports Officer and a Gymnastics Coach. It was created in response to latent demand for recreational/non-selective gymnastics in the Flint/Holywell area, with our focus on fun, fitness and friendship. 

Its aims were to offer affordable, accessible gymnastics sessions for children that were otherwise not able to participate and reap the benefits the sport has to offer. After the first year of running in Flint the club opened another club based in Holywell responding to high demand for access to our club in that area also.

Why are we crowdfunding?

We currently operate out of two high school sports facilities. But we now have a waitlist that is very large and are unable to add more sessions due to lack of availability of the facilities. We share the space with other clubs and currently need to set up and pack away for every session. This takes time and adds wear and tear to our equipment, which is expensive to buy and repair.

We have found a unit that we can move into and create a dedicated facility. This will allow us to expand the amount and variety of sessions we offer. It will allow us to provide a safe, supportive space for our members to enjoy challenging themselves and grow in confidence. We will also be able to offer sessions to a wider range of community members, including parents and toddlers, children with disabilities, local schools, youth services and adult’s freestyle sessions.

How we’ll spend the money raised

The money raised will go towards making the new facility suitable for our activities and a friendly place to meet others interested in our sport. The floor in the unit needs levelling so that our equipment will sit securely on it and outside we need to add signage to manage safety when parking, drop off, pick up, plus, of course, our club name and logo on the building. We will need to cover costs of transporting our existing equipment to the new facility, plus adding more equipment to ensure that we make the most of the space we have and can cope with the increased demand for our sessions. 

We need to create an office space where we can run the administration of the club from and a break room with a small kitchen for our team of young leaders and coaches. We have plans to host birthday parties so money for decorating and furnishing a party room will be very useful in allowing us to get started with that additional income stream straight away.

And finally, we need to run a marketing campaign to spread the word to more people in new areas about our facility and build up our membership.

Community impact

The main areas that we can impact are:

• Retention of Women and Girls in Sport                                              
• Opportunities for Children in areas of deprivation                                                    
• Children with Disabilities

Gymnastics can help a child develop confidence in themselves and physical competency that can carry through into all other physical activities. Making them happy to participate in new sports and challenge themselves in different ways.

During and since Covid we have seen an increase in challenges to children's mental health such as increased anxiety and stress in social situations. We have trained our team in mental health awareness to help us better support the children we coach and help them by ensuring their gymnastics sessions to be a safe space.

With our new space we have plans to offer day time sessions for parents and toddlers, classes for children who are home-schooled, and dedicated disability sessions for children from local special needs schools. 

We already deliver for Flintshire Schools on the Food and Fun Programme in the summer holidays and would like to develop that relationship further by inviting them to bring their children to our facility to experience a gymnastics session, benefitting from all of the competition standard equipment. This will also offer a training and development opportunity to the teachers that attend with their classes and help them to become more confident in delivering gymnastics sessions at school.

We currently partner with Aura Leisure and Libraries in the evenings offering community sessions in Freestyle gymnastics. These sessions give teenagers a space to explore their own physical capabilities and challenge themselves in determining how they tackle the equipment in a safe and supportive environment. With our own facility we will be able to offer more of these sessions to children from other areas and increase the equipment that they will have available to challenge themselves on. We will also be opening up adult gymnastics sessions to encourage parents within the community to try gymnastics as a way of improving their overall fitness whether that be in coordination, stamina, balance, agility or strength.

Our leadership volunteer programme is already a very successful one and has helped our members improve their CV's, apply for jobs in the leisure and childcare industries, and show valuable volunteering and extra curricular training and development on their personal statements for university applications. Our new facility will only increase those opportunities and give us a space to carry out more in-house workshops and host courses for our leaders and coaches to enrol on.

How you can play your part

There are four simple ways to help us reach our target, and make this project a reality.

1. Make a pledge. Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. Spread the word. Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

3. Offer rewards. Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

4. Fundraise for us. If you want to run your own fundraiser – maybe a sponsored activity or similar – use the 'contact project' button at the top of our page to let us know. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!