Basketball Development (Greig City)
Basketball Development (Greig City)
Greig City Academy is one of the top basketball schools in London with a notable strength in Girls basketball. Its teams regularly produce outstanding results in national competitions. Haringey Angels is the top girls' development club in London and is consistently one of the top 4 clubs nationally and is based at GCA.
Venture to increase the numbers of Primary School children receiving high quality training in a club situation so that there was an obvious school to club progression route . A successful application was made to the Local network funding for £4,000 to assist with court hire and to hire additional coaches to support our club coaches. Haringey Angels are Clubmark qualified and have the paperwork and structure in place to comfortably handle such a project.
The project has run on Saturdays and was advertised to local schools and over 80 children have attended on a regular basis for a 2 hour training session. An offshoot has been that the girls have been invited to additional training on Monday evenings during the summer term with the GCA girls with a view to running an Under 13 girls team that will compete in league competition in 2008-9.
GCA have a full time basketball coach (Ex England player - Andrew Bailey) who helps on Saturdays and he is able to guide the boys towards possible club and representative basketball The Primary boys have had the opportunity of playing representative games against Hackney . A further benefit has been that we have been able to put forward experienced youngsters for the Haringey Mini Games basketball team Regular participant Chyna Sawyers from Nightingale Primary played for the Angels in the National U14 Girls semi-final and has been selected for London U13 training.
The Future
We aim to develop the project further in 2008-9. The main problem is to keep our usual teams (U14 / U16 / U18) running whilst expanding our range of activities. This is a problem in an area where not all families are able to meet the true cost of the sessions and teams that we run. Next year we hope to appoint a part time administrator to deal with the paperwork and finance issues that come with the expansion of our activities.
Phil Hayfield
SSCO
Greig City Academy
