OAKWORTH Juniors now have 30 teams and nearly 500 players in their set-up, but they are not just all about football.
The Community Interest Company has grown hugely since the second and final major Covid-19 lockdown ended in April 2021, and have even provided invaluable support to the much-loved Manorlands Hospice, as well as Bradford Council.
Club treasurer Angela Baxter is keen to spread the word, and she told the Keighley News: “We’ve grown to 490 players at the club as it stands.
“We’ve expanded around the Bronte Playing Fields area and have taken on pitch maintenance from Bradford Council, while also letting the council use the clubhouse here to hold a youth club.
“We also give the clubhouse over to Manorlands for free if they want to use it for events and hold children’s parties there, including football ones on the pitches outside, for £15 an hour.”
Part of Baxter’s goal is to get all local residents to buy into and understand the project, as she admitted: “We just want the community to know what we’re doing.
“With us needing extra equipment and maintenance tools for the pitches after taking that on from Bradford Council, we’ve had to use a lot of car park space to store that, which has been met with opposition.
“If people understand why that’s the case, I hope they’ll be more accepting of the situation.
“Ultimately, with the youth club and the project as a whole, it allows us to get the kids out of the parks and into something more useful and rewarding.”
And Baxter was keen to reassure families that they do not have to break the bank to have their youngsters join up with Oakworth Juniors either.
She said: “We only charge £12 a month for the kids to use all our facilities, and there’s nowhere else in the area you could get something like this.
“Those fees haven’t gone up for six or seven years now, even though we’re having to fund things like winter training costs, which is £20,000 for us to fork out from October through to March.
“As well as Bronte Playing Fields, we also make use of Marley and University Academy Keighley too, but we do have to rely on a lot of fundraising to do all this, since we are a CIC.
“Even then, we donate some of the money we raise towards Manorlands to help them out, and the big drive for that comes on our summer funday fundraiser, which this year is on Saturday, July 6.”
As for the football offering, Baxter enthused: “We’ve been going since 1991, but the number of players we’ve got has gone up by just under 200 in the last three years.
“We’ve got an open age side here, as well as our Soccer Tots, and in total, we have 30 teams under our umbrella.
“Sundays are when our juniors play and when you see Goose Cote Lane so busy as a result and on match days, when our cafe is open, it’s open to the public too.
“We serve breakfast sandwiches, snacks and hot and cold drinks, while our meat is sourced by from Oxenhope butcher, Marsh Top Farm Shop too, so we support local where possible.
“We can often have up to 15 games on our pitches on any given Sunday but the weather has crippled us of late, so there haven’t been as many.
“One thing we are really looking forward to though is hosting the Junior League Cup Finals weekend again.
“We did it for the first time last year and it was such a success, that we’ve been asked to hold the event again, which is on Saturday, May 18 and Sunday, May 19 this year.
“It’s a great occasion to be a part of, as it’s essentially just two full days of football at the club.”
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