Veseyans RFC Empowering girls rugby thru fitness

Aim: We are looking to improve our flood lights and pitches at our club to encourage more ladies & girls to join our training sessions.

Who are we?

Veseyans Rugby & Sports Club, a community Rugby Club offering top quality rugby for all ages from 18 months to 65 years old, boys & girls, men & women. Based in Streetly, Sutton Coldfield which has been our home since 1955, we are pleased to have 3 senior sides,  1 ladies side, and 15 junior sides together with a developing touch rugby team. 

Why are we crowdfunding?

Our Project is 'Empowering girls rugby thru fitness' within the project we are looking to improve our flood lights and pitches at our club to encourage more ladies & girls to join our training sessions to improve their fitness and rugby skills. We offer Ladies training on a Monday & Thursday night and Girls training on a Wednesday night & Sunday morning.
Each session is run by trained coaches and runs for an hr to hr &1/2, both contact rugby & touch rugby sessions are offered.

How we’ll spend the money raised

We know that a rugby pitch can look intimidating to some ladies/girls especially as many of our training sessions are at night and there can be mist across the pitch. Improving the floodlights to LED's across all pitches will brighten and bring them to life showing ladies/girls that we can have fun & fitness at the same time.
We are extremely lucky to have a full Ladies Team who have played their very first match on the 28th March, as a club we need to continue to support them and offer them a safe and secure space to continue to train and improve their fitness.
Our current Flood lights are operated by a generator with mixed results, it can work well for one full session and then completely give out in another. The light given off does not have the coverage to light all the pitches so we have to pick and choose where this can be projected.

Traditional lights are very energy inefficient and not as durable as LEDs. As a club we face two challenges – we have more players training at night than ever and need more fully lit space, we have to run our existing lights off a generator as we have maxed out the existing supply to the site and this is become more expensive now we have to use higher priced white diesel. Our project will see us add an additional electric supply and remove the generator as the primary supply. This will reduce the running costs. Upgrading to LED will reduce the total electric load but illuminate a bigger area which again saves money. Finally, it will allow us to spread the wear on the pitches more evenly which will deliver better quality playing services for longer.

Community impact

As well as a Ladies team, we have been promoting girls rugby for a number of years now and have players in U14,U16 & U18 girls teams as well as younger girls who will make the move from coed rugby to all girls in the next couple of years. Encouraging them to increase their training to twice a week will improve their skills and fitness to make the games more enjoyable. A dull poorly light training pitch may put them off training and put them off bringing down new players to join them.
Across the club we have all levels of teams we also local schools, universities and sports groups to use our pitches for their training & games.
Improving the flood lights will also benefit all these groups as we can increase the opening times we can offer the pitches for training and games.

How you can play your part

The joint initiative provided by Sport England and Crowdfunder will pledge up to 50% match (up to £15,000) to our proposed sum (£35,000) if we are successful. This is where you, our valued members and supporters can help.

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!

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 4th August 2025 at 5:00am