Longford Girls Football Club — CROMA Sponsorship

Ear­li­er this year Chorl­ton’s favourite pizze­ria did what all the major play­ers do and bag them­selves a bit of footy spon­sor­ship. Set up in 2012 by two mums who want­ed to encour­age their daugh­ters who were inter­est­ed in foot­ball and sup­port as many oth­er girls local­ly as pos­si­ble to play foot­ball, here’s what LGFC’s web­site has to say. 

The sport seemed to be dom­i­nat­ed by boys and fac­ul­ties and oppor­tu­ni­ties were not there for girls to play. There seemed to be no expec­ta­tion that girls would want to play and those who did, did not have the con­fi­dence to play in a mixed team (with a few excep­tions) We also tried to address oth­er bar­ri­ers to par­tic­i­pa­tion; lack of income, lack of trans­port, lack of time/ enthu­si­asm of par­ents to sup­port girls foot­ball as well as their sons whose foot­ball was often pri­ori­tised in the fam­i­ly. Also the girl’s lack of con­fi­dence in their abil­i­ty and lack of role mod­els (only see­ing men’s teams play).

Many girls and their par­ents did­n’t take girls foot­ball seri­ous­ly in that they did­n’t have foot­ball boots and turned up in soft shoes and train­ers with thin socks, so was­n’t able to ful­ly par­tic­i­pate or got cold or injured.

We start­ed train­ing in the local park and quick­ly grew from 10 girls to over 30 and had 2 full teams a year lat­er that we entered into the fol­low­ing sea­sons league at South Man­ches­ter. The fol­low­ing sea­son, hav­ing attract­ed younger girls to join (8 and 9 year olds) and with new vol­un­teer coach­es, from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­ches­ter wom­en’s team, we were able to form a third team into the league.

We were also joined by anoth­er woman coach whose own side had fold­ed but who still had some girls want­i­ng to con­tin­ue playing.Recognition of the achieve­ments of the club have been in 2013 when our club sec­re­tary and coach Sharon Whe­lan was award­ed the COACH OF THE YEAR 2013 by Man­ches­ter FA and fol­low­ing year Long­ford girls were award­ed TRAFFORD CLUB OF THE YEAR 2014.

We wish our local girls team every suc­cess for the rest of the season!