Southend Diving Coronavirus Crowdfunder

Aim

We aim to raise funds to purchase new equipment/PPE. We'll walk 3836miles as a group, the equivalent distance to all the comps we've missed.

Who are we?
Southend Diving is made up of over 65 divers ranging in age from 6 to 80! We are a small club based in South East Essex but have made a big impact in the diving world. Since our creation we have had divers compete at all levels including the Olympics. We are based in Southend Leisure and Tennis Centre using a dry gym and pool that was created for the Olympics in 2012 and has been used by the GB Diving team as a training base. We have a state of the art dry gym and a diving pool that has boards all the way up to 10m. We are passionate about diving and want others to try the sport and fall in love with it too.

COVID-19 and it’s impact

Like many sports we have been affected by COVID-19 and our fundraising has been significantly impacted.  We have been unable to hold our usual events or gain sponsorship during this difficult time. We require your help to enable us to get back to training as quickly as we can once the pools are allow to reopen. We are in need of new equipment for poolside so we can socially distance, equipment that can be used outside to allow more divers to train at one time and PPE to allow our coaches to continue to the amazing work they do with the divers. We also have several pieces of equipment that we wish to replace in our dry gym (the dry gym allows divers to learn and train a new dive before trying it out in the pool).  

Community Outreach

Before lockdown was were offering free diving lessons to try and encourage others into the sport. We wanted to increase our numbers whilst helping the local community get fit. Diving, as a sport, can help increase not only fitness levels but it also can help with mental well being. We know sport releases endorphins which help reduce pain. We often find diving increases confidence in those who take part. Jumping off that 5metre board for the first time can be a great rush, doing something that is new and is slightly scary can help children realise they can do new things, they can achieve something. At the moment we have had to suspend our outreach program.  We have in the past targeted schools, going in to visit them and hope to do this again in the future once schools have returned and we are allowed back to the pool.

What we aim to do

As a Club we would have been travelling to several diving competitions across the UK and in Sofia, Bulgaria during this time. Our Skills divers would have been travelling to Corby, our Age group divers would have been travelling to Sheffield and our Elite divers would have been headed to Plymouth. There also would have been qualifying events in Southampton and Crawley.  Some of our divers had been selected to compete in an international competition in Sofia, Bulariga. Leaving our pool in Southend and visiting each one of these venues before returning home would be the equivalent of 3836 miles. We have decided we are going to walk/run/cycle or swim the distance as a group. Divers will log their miles whilst adhering to Government guidelines on social distancing and exercise.

Match Funding

We hope to raise £5000 for the equipment we need. If we manage to raise £2,500 we have won a match funding grant from Sports England for 50% of our target. Any donation you make, no matter how small will enable us to gain this extra money and can help us to get back to training as quickly as possible after such a long absence.

This project successfully funded on 4th August 2020