Heelands Fun & Games Y
Heelands Rangers FC, in Milton Keynes, are the only female football club charity in the UK. The last four years have been difficult for the club and, as Director of Trustees Lewis Elford explains, the next five years look like being just as tough!
ou take a 60 year old, six football pitches, a sports pavilion and over 150 girls wanting to play football and what do you have? I’ll tell you. You have a panic attack Four years ago, under
pressure from girls living in the area, a one team girl’s club was formed to enter local leagues and play football. We rented a pitch at Heelands Sports Ground in Milton Keynes, they played and they had fun. We scrounged money for their strips and equipment, then you suddenly find that girls are coming out of the woodwork and you end up, four years later with six teams and a 25 year lease on six pitches and a large building to heat and light.
Then it dawns on you that you have to find machinery to paint lines, to cut grass, to
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aerate grass, to roll pitches and all on a budget of nothing.
This is what happened to me, but to make all the above look easy, I am in a wheelchair after a nasty person put an anti-tank mine under the wheels of my Land Rover.
TO start with we became a Charity with a Board of Trustees. I joined the IOG and found Pitchcare on line. I studied, I read, I groaned, and I am still searching for help now. RJM in Aylesbury came charging to the rescue first, after placing a wanted add on the Pitchcare website, and sold us a tough Scag Turf Tiger for a modest sum. After learning all the basics of it’s use, I swopped it for my wheelchair and got working. Then came the problem of aeration. Prices flying at me
like there was no tomorrow and the best was £250 for one pitch. As a charity that had just outfitted six teams, paid rent for winter training on a school astro-turf at £3400 for one winter, I had the job of looking for a really good spiker because our pitches consist of 2 inches of turf and then clay all the way to China.
I tried to get one cheaply, even pestering a poor bloke for an evening by e-mail, but we still have not got one. I got around this by going along in my wheelchair wih a garden fork. I bought my wife a line marker for Christmas and she kindly marks the pitches out every Friday. She is getting pretty good at it but still has a few choice words when anyone moans about the straightness of a line!!!!
I then discover SCH
Supplies and their remarkable equipment, so we purchased the trailer and aerator, with a roller coming soon, we hope. The only problem was attaching it to the Scag. My first welding job was not too good and the second was even worse, so now I just tie it with a rope and hope for the best. The Scag has not let me down yet. As an ex-soldier, the
ground has always been my friend, but my friendship with it now is a love-hate relationship. I have spent a lot of time reading the IOG and Pitchcare magazines and loads of books from the library and, whilst I am still a novice, I know enough when to cancel a game and work a rotation around the pitches. As for a budget, we do not have one, unless you count my credit card. I have just used that to buy 25 kg of
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