Reading FC provided Sky Bet Building Foundations Fund grant to support local grassroots coaches | OneFootball

The Royals are doing great work in the community

League One club Reading are collaborating with the Sky Bet EFL Building Foundations Fund to better the lives of grassroots coaches.

The £10,000 grant that the Royals have received from the fund will be used to provide opportunities for these coaches, many of whom aren't entitled to any of the FRS programmes of support (e.g. mentoring support for people from ethnic minority backgrounds, female or coaches with a disability).

The club will look at the impact that the grassroots community currently has around Reading and Berkshire - and will also collaborate with the Football Association (FA) to support the coaching workforce.

Bridging sessions will take place to support coaches who are waiting for a place on UEFA C/LJEFA B courses, but are yet to be allocated a place due to high demand and a limited number of places available.

How the work of the Berks and Bucks FA benefits the Reading Community Trust

This programme, working alongside the Berks and Bucks FA, will deliver a range of different sessions.

Speaking about how valuable the Berks and Berks do already, Reading Community Trust manager Dave Evans said: "From our FA, the Berks and Bucks FA, all I've seen is lots of support that they give to local grassroots teams.

"From a coaching point of view, and I was Chairman of a grassroots club, if we ever had any issues, we'd go straight to the local FA at the Berks and Bucks, who I have a good relationship with.

"Knowing a lot of the managers from other clubs as well, I think they'd probably say the same as well."

Chris Berry, who is the Funded Programmes Officer at the Trust, added: "Our local Berks and Bucks FA, they don't have the delivery staff that they once did.

"So, pre-Covid, each county FA would have a set of county coach developers who were county-based and were able to run regular CPD events and things like that. That's now no longer the case.

"We're very lucky that we've got the Berks and Bucks and Richard Brant, who is the workforce manager, has been a core part of this programme alongside us.

"He's incredibly passionate about making sure there are a lot of CPD opportunities available and as much of that as possible is face-to-face.

"The online stuff is great and it's actually good at reaching those who can't necessarily commit to getting somewhere because of a lot of issues that coaches face, in terms of time, childcare, travel and anything like that.

"But to be able to have a project like this that enables and facilitates more of those face-to-face opportunities is massive."

A lot of aspiring coaches have struggled to secure a place on UEFA C/LJEFA B courses, but the programme that's been made possible by the Sky Bet EFL Building Foundations Fund, Reading Football Club and The Berks and Bucks FA, will help some of these people to remain active and potentially be better prepared for when they eventually have the chance to secure one of the qualifications.

Advanced CPD (continuing professional development) sessions will also be run to support those who have reached level 2 or above in their coaching qualifications and aren't likely to complete another one, but would still be keen to continue learning to enhance their delivery and help to retain older players beyond U16 age groups.

This programme isn't just there to support current coaches, but it will also help to train new ones, with the £10,000 grant also set to be used to fund CPD sessions for them. It will help to support clubs to develop their volunteer workforce too.

Clearly, this grant from the Sky Bet EFL Building Foundations Fund can only be a good thing and will help coaches in the local community. But Berry also believes this could benefit hundreds of players too.

Asked whether he noticed the difference that the grant was making already, Berry continued: "It's probably part of a longer, slower process than that. For a lot of these coaches who have engaged with the project so far, it's been a real balance.

"A mixture of those that have been coaching for a long time, but haven't had a lot of access to opportunities to continue developing, and then there's some who haven't really had a lot of interaction at all, and this is their first step into that CPD and upskilling world.

"So, it's difficult to say that there's been a massive increase in the quality of grassroots coaching, but I think the impact we can say we've had, we're confident that what we've delivered has been overwhelmingly positively received and hopefully has had an impact upon the players.

"One of the core parts of our bid was that, although we're only aiming to work with 250 coaches, if those 250 coaches are working with between 10-20 players each, actually the number of players we're influencing is much greater than that, so there's the potential for this to have a really big impact.

"From the feedback we had, particularly from our cornerstone event (the Berks and Bucks FA coaches conference) in the summer, the feedback was just overwhelming positive with things ranging from: new ideas to take away, some good ideas that people wanted to try, all the way through to 'this has completely changed the way I look at certain elements of my coaching', which is what we're looking to do.

"We're trying to transform what coaches know and what they can do for the better.

"It's a difficult one to put a definitive 'yes, everything's a lot better', but I'm pretty confident to say that it (the grant) has helped."

Berry did, however, also comment more on the short-term impacts of the fund, with this injection of cash making a difference during a difficult time for Reading Football Club, who have endured cash flow issues in recent years.

"Initiatives like this one have been fantastic. Like Dave says, there wasn't a lot of paperwork or things we had to go through. As long as we could justify that we think there's a need that we identified, that we thought we could execute very well, it was like: 'yes, fantastic, we'd love to be a part of that', which is massive for us.

"And it's really helped us have the freedom to engage with the right stakeholders and do things in a way that we think could be really impactful in our area, which, alongside the Berks and Bucks FA, it's allowed us to tailor it exactly to what we need to do.

All of this work builds on what the Reading FC Community Trust has done in recent years.

Not only have they helped to keep the Women's team afloat, but they have also come to the rescue of disadvantaged young people in the local area.

They have worked alongside the football club to make this a reality, with the Trust aiming to see more than 3,500 participants on a weekly basis.