Ponteland High’s Jack elected to the Northumberland FA Youth Council
In early February, the Northumberland FA council released a promotion encouraging 16-21 year olds to take part in a ‘Youth Council’. The plan was to develop and improve the football community and try to get people involved in football more often.
People interested in becoming part of the council had to fill in a form to express their interest in the role and share a little bit about themselves. This provided the person in charge of the youth council to have some background information on candidates and make sure they were suitable applicants.
Jack commented, “For me, I expressed my love for football, love for the media and the desire to improve football and make it a lot more accessible and more diverse. After having an interview with the person in charge, they accepted me as part of Northumberland FA Youth Council. This led to a team meeting a week later. The team consists of a variety of ages from 15 to university students. Our first meeting as a team consisted of introducing ourselves to one another and getting to know each other. We discussed roles and responsibilities that we would take on and discussed events in the summer planned for us to get involved in. These events would consist of creating a ‘Positive Week’ - aiming at making football a fun and a safe experience; food banks - helping clubs arrange mass fundraising events to support the local community and make football as positive as possible while helping less fortunate people; a promotion video - advertising these events; and finally - trying to encourage people to donate old kit so we can recycle them for people who might not be able to afford kit and especially boots.
The things that attracted me to the role was what I could bring to the Youth Council and what I could get out of it. For me, my experience of playing football and studying sports at GCSE’s allows me to have a good amount of knowledge on this type of work, learning about National Governing Bodies and events in football like ‘No room for racism’ and ‘Respect’ for the referees. Also, the amount of skills I will develop and be able to use in the future will be very useful and important, which makes it very unique to DofE. It will look very good for employees looking at my CV as it will show that I have skills like teamwork, listening skills, problem solving and commitment. Finally, the amount of roles that you can do is varied, which was very appealing to me. From being main coordinator, media promotion, referee representative, coaches representative and many more. These roles vary depending on the event and allow me to experience as many roles as possible and give lots of different views on football.
Overall, my main goal out of this unique experience is to make a change and hopefully make football more inclusive for everyone and really make a difference to my local football community.
Kieran McGrane said, “Jack is a wonderful young man with an outstanding attitude. It is great to see him getting involved in a volunteering capacity and I am sure he will gain as much as gives in this role.”
