Yeovil Town Ladies Football Club have welcomed Berrow Junior Football Club as a gold member to its newly-launched ‘sister club’ programme.
Through signing up, Berrow JFC will receive coaching sessions, player appearances from Yeovil Town Ladies, tickets to FA Women’s Super League matches at Huish Park, plus opportunities to be mascots, ball girls and flag bearers.
The Sister Club Programme is an FA initiative, aimed at engaging with young footballers, in the hope that each club has a 100% retention rate of players, along with increasing the amount of players within their club through recruitment opportunities.
Ellie Curson, who is Yeovil Town Ladies first team captain and also the Sister Club Programme Officer, told Burnham-On-Sea.com: “I think the sister club will really benefit Berrow Junior Football Club.”
“We organsied a girls football festival just before our game against Millwall and this just shows what we are about as a club.”
“We’re trying to offer clubs as much as we can, to try and improve girls participation within the area.”
Dean Adams, who is in charge of girls development at Berrow, explained why they wanted to become a Sister Club: “We’ve been working with Ellie for a few weeks now trying to get the programme in place and we thought it was the right thing to do for the girls development.”
“We currently got 30 girls at Berrow and we wanted to grow and thought this was the ideal opportunity to do it.”
“It’s a fantastic opportunity. A lot of the girls come along to games to watch them and look up to them, with some also training at the Yeovil development centre. They already look up to the likes of Ellie and Annie [Heatherson] and just want to be around them, so it’s great that they are a part of that now.”
And Somerset FA’s Sarah Nickless, a Football Development Officer, added: “For Berrow it gives them the opportunity to have access to the players in different sessions, developing the coaches, which in turn will develop the players.”
“Female players really enjoy interacting with young players. They see the benefit and they understand that’s exactly where they came from. If we don’t support them at the bottom of the game when the players are coming in, we’re not going to keep them in the game.”
Berrow JFC are keen to hear from anyone who is not currently playing football, but would like to by, via email at: Berrowjfc-gds@mail.com
Berrow JFC Girls are looking for players in year 4 to year 11 and train at King Alfred School’s astro turf every Friday evening.
