Leicester Nirvana FC

Aim

To provide support for continued learning through the transition of social isolation back in to society by diversifying our football offer.

The aim of the project

The COVID19 pandemic is going to affect young people in many different ways and each young person will deal with the affects in their own way. Football is at the heart of many communities and we want to provide support for continued learning through the transition of social isolation back in to society.

Our key objective is to diversify our football offer to meet the current demands of young people. Our project focuses on these key objectives; 

• Provide each child with a football COVID-19 pack - a football, training bib, water bottle and notepad to continue home learning 
• Deliver an online football training utilising and working with specialised coaching platforms already in existence in order to mobilise quickly and more efficiently 
• Promote online learning resources to enhance desktop learning 
• Be available for online Parent and young person one to ones 
• Complete weekly online team meetings with player/ parents and their coaches 
• Provide a support mechanism for parents and carers around health & wellbeing.

We know that the Covid19 pandemic is having a big impact on young people as well as the clubs, groups, organisations that support them. The impact this will have on young people is likely to be intense and long lasting, especially for the most vulnerable and those from deprived areas, and BME backgrounds (as studies show it affects them in a more focused way).

The whole country has started to consider how to adapt to a partial digital service and football should be no different. It is vital to find various ways to support young people by moving an element of their learning and support online. Young people need to be connected to the world and we want to develop a football offer that we can start to mobilise during Covid19, as well as through the transition period and after. We believe this can make a great difference to supporting young people back in to football and daily life.

Impact on young people

Never in our lifetime has there been a more important time for clubs to support young people to take back their lives. Some of the wider impacts on young people will be around:

• Increased mental health or wellbeing concerns
• Increased loneliness and isolation
• Not being able to access their youth club
• Increased social media or online pressure
• Higher risk for engaging in gangs or other harmful practices

Youth organisations will no doubt be delivering reduced service provision to young people as well as having to make staff redundancies. Volunteers will be in high demand as organisations move to fill gaps in provision. This includes football clubs like ours who are volunteer led and at the sharp end of supporting young people. 

What we want to do

Fitness, health and wellbeing are the key to how we want to adapt our support to young people. Football as it was at the beginning of the year, is not how it will be for the foreseeable future. As a grassroots club, we need to be able to adapt to changes and the way things are traditionally done. 

The lockdown period has forced us to develop our online and digital offer and to embrace change. We have shaped our new offer to include the following; 

• We will deliver an online football training offer utilising/ working with specialised coaching platforms already in existence in order to mobilise quickly and more efficiently 
• Complete weekly online team meetings with player/ parents and their coaches 
• Be available for online Parent and young person one to ones where needed
• Provide each child with a football COVID-19 pack - a football, training bib, water bottle and notepad to continue home learning 
• Utilise and promote stakeholder online learning and resources to enhance desktop learning 
• Provide a support mechanism for parents and carers around health & wellbeing.

As we move in to social distancing, training will be limited, but what it will do is start to introduce players back into football and back into their football social groups at a safe distance. Our offer:

• We will introduce face to face small sided training, keeping players 2 meters apart and continuing the learning practice of ball mastery.
• Young people will be able to use their football COVID-19 pack previously supplied to them
• We will continue our online football training offer as a standard going forward. This will provide consistent skills based learning

As we are able to revert back to a normal style of living and training, we will keep a keen eye on the wellbeing of our young people.

• We will transition into full team training, whilst monitoring any health conditions. 
• We will embed our online football training offer into our daily offer to provide consistent skills based learning
• We will promote good mental health across the club and make members aware of our welfare officer for those who may be facing or have any concerns. 
• We will complete a short questionnaire/ survey with our young people to better understand how they are feeling returning back to football and moving away from social restrictions

Benefits to our approach 

We understand that professional academies are taking some of these approaches to keep young people active, which means our young people will stay in touch with advances in the direction football is moving. Throwing young people back into society will not work for all. By providing support for continued learning through the transition of social isolation back in to society will mean that we are able to ease young people back into engagement on a wider scale.

This project successfully funded on 28th July 2020