Calverley United JFC Girls Football Team seek new players and coaches

National World - LocalTV

With the Lionesses inspiring the next generation of players at the FIFA Women’s World Cup, we head along to a Calverley United JFC training session as they seek new players and coaches.

Transcript

00:00 [LAUGHTER]

00:05 I am James Clayton, the girls chairman for Calverley United Junior Football Club.

00:09 I've been with the club since 2017.

00:13 Primarily, it was to just set up a new girls section for the club.

00:16 We started out with seven girls, and we've now got in the region about 130.

00:20 We found early days that a boy will kick a football every single day,

00:25 but with the girls, you've got to literally get them to come along to play football.

00:29 But they absolutely love playing football.

00:32 And progressively, as we've gone along, you see more and more of them out in the park,

00:35 more and more of them training, more of them doing additional training outside of the club.

00:39 And it's just the enthusiasm that the girls now have for the game, it's just brilliant to see.

00:42 I think mainly what made me want to play football more was when I watched my first women's match,

00:47 because I was a bit bored with the men's matches, but then I watched that one,

00:50 and then I thought, "Oh, I might give it a try."

00:53 I just wanted to keep playing because I wanted to get as good as I could really get,

00:58 and just, yeah, and have fun, you know?

01:00 I just, like, I saw it on the TV all the time, and I just thought, "Oh, I want to do that, it looks fun."

01:06 I wanted to play football because, oh yeah, the England women's inspired me.

01:12 We entered teams into the West Riding Girls Football League.

01:15 It's one of the biggest leagues in the country, I believe, now.

01:17 We also entered a few teams into the Harrogate League.

01:20 The West Riding League is by far the more competitive of the two leagues.

01:24 There's lots and lots of teams there. There was five divisions, under 12s last year.

01:29 We were in Division 2 ourselves, really competitive.

01:33 The girls have got through to the West Riding Cup final twice on two occasions.

01:38 Unfortunately, we didn't make it across the line on both occasions.

01:41 I think the lionesses, they, like, because they do so well in what they do,

01:45 they show that, like, because it's normally that people think about the boys' football when they think of football,

01:51 but it shows that, like, the girls are just as good as the boys at doing football.

01:55 It shows that girls can do it, and since so many people watched the World Cup,

02:00 it made more people, more girls, interested in football.

02:05 You've got to have some fun involved in this.

02:07 So it's not necessarily just about the football, it's about the social aspect as well.

02:10 The parents love coming along.

02:12 You know, some of the parents would never have thought they'd be footy mums, and now they're obsessed.

02:16 I think I've been here six or seven years.

02:21 Same time as Freya.

02:23 I just like playing football, and it's good fun, yeah.

02:27 I joined football around two years ago, and I like it because you make a lot of friendships,

02:34 and it's just good fun, and you learn a lot from it.

02:37 We've always had a missing team in the under-12s,

02:40 and as we transition through from five-a-side to seven-a-side,

02:43 you get to nine-a-side and eventually eleven-a-side,

02:47 the younger age group, we want to keep at nine-a-side.

02:50 So that's why we want to develop an under-12s team.

02:53 The next goal, I suppose, is to get more women involved.

02:56 We really do need the women to come forward.

02:59 There's some fantastic women coaches in girls football now,

03:02 and if we can get more women on board, that'd be brilliant.

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