Taking Korfball to absolutely everyone!

Who are we?

It all starts with a dream: a dream to be healthy, a dream to be strong, a dream to be fast, a dream to be number one. At Tornadoes Korfball Club & Academy we’ve been making dreams come true since 2004. Our Korfball Club & Academy was founded by Jackie Hubbard who had a desire and passion to bring this amazing game to more young people. Today the club has over 100 members ranging from 3 years old to 70 years old. During that time Tornadoes has developed successful youth programmes that has produced over 30 international players. Whether you’re a novice or an international, want to play for fun or indeed at the highest levels, come and fulfil your potential with our outstanding coaching team at Tornadoes Korfball Club & Academy. 

So what is korfball?

Korfball is a ball sport, with similarities to netball and basketball. It is played by two teams of eight players with four female players and four male players in each team. The objective is to shoot a ball into a netless basket that is mounted on a tall pole that can be anywhere between 2.5m and 3.5m high dependant of the age of the player.

Invented by a Dutch school teacher in 1902, there are now approximately 500 clubs and more than 90,000 people playing in its home nation of The Netherlands and continues to grow worldwide. It is now played in more than 70 countries.

Community impact

Tornadoes Korfball Club & Academy is proud to have been able to utilise the excellent facilities at Chatham Grammar School in the Medway Towns. 

We pride ourselves on our involvement with local schools and local events where we showcase both our sport and our club. Recruitment at a young age has been the bed rock of our success and has taken us to where we are today - having a youth programme that has produced over 30 international players. 

Why are we crowdfunding?

We know it sounds clichéd, but Tornadoes really is one big family sports academy and in essence we have huge ambitions to extend and improve our family. 

Covid hit us hard and now with increasing general costs, including fuel, energy, equipment costs and essentials that we buy to run our club we are keen to raise much needed funds to allow us to:

• Bring more members of all ages back into the sport post covid 
• Develop a programme to take korfball into schools to share with youngsters in a part of the country that would benefit significantly from it
• To allow the club to maintain subs at existing levels to ease the pressure on our members

Korfball one of the only truly mixed gender team sports around and it is highly accessible but so few people know about it. Anyone can start to play korfball at any age and at Tornadoes, we welcome everyone. 

Diversity and inclusion is our absolute priority. 

It is our aim to develop a multi-level strategy to bring our sport to more tots, juniors, teens and adults alike. 

We have recently advertised the (voluntary) post of Recruitment Manager for our club but recognise that to do this successfully, we need these additional funds.

It is essential that we now raise funds to bridge the gap of costs verses income and also build a robust campaign to deliver on our 3 priorities.

We are delighted to confirm that Sport England will be supporting our campaign and if we can achieve £2,500 towards our target, from a minimum of 25 individual supporters within the allotted duration of the campaign, they will offer us an additional £2,500 - Wow!

How we’ll spend the money raised

Our Executive Committee will work alongside our Recruitment Manager to allocate funds to deliver on the 3 priorities and to build awareness of korfball and in particular Tornadoes Korfball Club and Academy. 

Our plan:

1. General Recruitment

• Local promotional events give us such a great opportunity to share our passion with so many new and diverse people - young and old. To make a success of these we need to have promotional material - banners, flags and flyers so will be able to invest in elements such as these to maximise every opportunity. 
• We would also invest in social media...To have some funds available to strategically target new audiences through Facebook and Instagram would be incredible, maybe even launching a club TikTok page - could well be a game changer!

2. Schools

• We will also be able to further develop our schools programme which has proved so successful in attracting new players to our club. 
• Our fabulous coaches currently invest in our club from both a time perspective and a personal expense perspective. We would like to support them more to cover their costs.

3. Financial

• Ensure that we can continue to run our training sessions in our current venue. With energy and fuel costs rising, our cost to train has increased. We want to be able to continue to do what we have done so well for so many years.
• Invest in new equipment and match kit. When times are so tough for so many families, it would be ideal to offer every new player to the club a complimentary Tornadoes match top.
• Where appropriate we would support families that may be significantly struggling with the current cost of living crisis. 
• We will pledge to keep subs static for at least this next year.

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. If you want to run your own fundraiser to support us, 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!

A message from our chairman, Richard Woodham

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