April 2021

Be Active Wales Funding – Sport Wales

Over the past few months, we’ve been supporting a number of clubs with their Sport Wales funding applications, specifically the Be Active Wales fund, a fund which aims to protect and progress community sport clubs and organisations in Wales through the Covid-19 pandemic, and in to the future. 

There are a number of clubs across Wales that have recently found out that their applications have been successful, and their work now is to ensure that they order the equipment that they’d applied for, ready for June/July delivery. We’ll have much more news about these clubs over the coming months!

One club that got their application in quickly was Neyland Yacht Club, and they found out before Christmas that they’d been successful!
The main goal of their project is to increase participation and development of sailing at Neyland Yacht Club. Their plan to do this involved purchasing a new Safety boat which allows them to increase capacity at their training sessions. They also applied for funding to purchase six new Tera dinghies which allowed them to have the equipment available to increase the number of beginner sailors in their junior sailing programme. Neyland Yacht Club were able to offer eight Stage 1 beginner spaces on the junior sailing programme, but with the addition of the new safety boat and six Teras dinghies, they are now able to increase this number up to fourteen available places. Another aspect of their project was to increase adult participation. As with many other clubs, people move away and stop contributing, and at Neyland they have a great team of volunteers that have kept the club, and more importantly the Junior sailing afloat. They realised that they’d reached a point where they were ready to grow and develop what the club could offer. The club was built by adults wanting to sail, and the junior sailing was created to teach their children, and recently they have struggled to get new adults into the sport; however, by getting new boats they are able to offer affordable, high quality and fun training to get people hooked on the sailing!

 

Disability Sport Wales Awards

Friday 9th April saw the Annual Disability Sport Wales Awards taking place, and of course, because of the current situation, these awards were held virtually!

Nominated for the Organisation of the Year Award were SEAS Sailability, a charity dedicated to getting the disabled people of North Wales, their families and carers active and having fun on (and around) the water.

As you can imagine there was a lot of excitement around when the awards evening was upon us, but unfortunately, SEAS weren’t the overall winners on this occasion, pipped by the Welsh Rugby Union (quite illustrious company we’re sure you’ll agree!)

You can find out a little bit more about the awards and Disability Sport Wales here: https://www.disabilitysportwales.com/news/2021/04/12/dsw-virtual-awards-winners/ 

 

Pembrokeshire Performance Sailing Academy (PPSA) – Easter Regatta

The weekend of the 3rd and 4th of April saw PPSA host their Easter Regatta, a fantastic two day event that saw eager participants back on the water!

They were very much blessed with fantastic sunny weather for both days of the Easter weekend, and the wind developed nicely on Sunday giving everyone a superb first weekend back to the sport after a very long break.

Well done to all the sailors, parents and the PPSA team for their hard work and application of Covid procedures – great work!

 

 

Welsh Sports Association (WSA): Grassroots Initiative

 
We are in the midst of a national crisis for Grassroots sports, and that’s why the WSA have teamed up with Croft Communications to help launch their Grassroots Initiative.

Initially, Croft are opening the scheme up to 200 clubs on a first-come, first-served basis. However, with over 5,500 sports clubs across Wales, there is long-term potential for this investment into Welsh grassroots-level sport to run into £millions.

How it works - 2 simple steps
 
1. Club players, supporters and members redirect their existing business communications spend to Croft’s cutting-edge telecoms services, increasing business efficiency, productivity and profitability.
2. Croft then immediately inject a % of the cash back into the club! This could add up to a sizeable donation in the hundreds – or even thousands, every year.

How do clubs get involved?

Visit The Grassroots Initiative for more information or contact Jon Poole, Croft’s Director of Partnerships, at jon.poole@croftcommunications.co.uk / 01920 449201.

 

Racing Coach Level 2 Courses

Registration is now up and running for a series of Racing Coach Level 2 sessions over the coming months.

 
You can check out the dates below and click on the links for more information.
 
8-9th May – Llandegfedd Water Sports
https://welshsailingevents.org/event-registration-2/?ee=800
 
12-13th June – Neyland Yacht Club
https://welshsailingevents.org/event-registration-2/?ee=801
 
26-27th June – Llyn Brenig Sailing Club
https://welshsailingevents.org/event-registration-2/?ee=802


That’s it from us this month – see you in May!

The RYA Cymru Wales Development Team.