Easter/April is always a great time for us at Enjoy Football CIC.
This year we not only celebrated our 4th birthday as Enjoy Football but also the re boot of many of our sessions, so it was a particularly busy and happy place to be.
First up, we managed to get our midweek evening walking footballers back. We have 2 sessions in normal times on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but as they are indoors and these aren’t normal times,we can't resume them as yet. We grabbed an opportunity of vacated slot outdoors with both hands and got the 2 groups to join forces just while we are waiting for the go ahead to get back to the usual sessions. Quite a few of these players have not played with each other before so it's a joy to see them all forging new friendships and working together, plus we've already got a couple of new recruits to the game.
Next was our very popular Walking football session at Penketh. This is an over 60s only session and since we started back in October 2020 and bearing in mind, we have only had 8 sessions, we are getting new players every week. It's looking like we will have to increase the time we have available to get everybody in.
#OneGameAtaTime on Friday nights was back with an absolutely belter of a night. This is our session to help try and tackle Men's mental health and prevention of Suicide. It's a game of football fours in which we play 7-minute games with built in time in between games for the players to engage with each other or speak to players who have lived experience of mental health issues. The essence is Play & Talk.
On the same night, Women's Only Walking Football session returned. With a glorious spring evening backing us it was a perfect setting to get back into the swing of things. Again, this is session which is becoming popular. It's an open age session and is something just a little bit different and we'd love to see a few more ladies coming along.
Saturday was our superstars 3-5-year olds groups. I love coaching this bunch of kids as it's their first steps on their footballing journey and wonderful to see how they are developing. Despite not doing anything for 16 weeks (some of them had shot up) they remembered all the stuff we had done pre lockdown and really got into the session with a trick or two up their sleeves
That was week one, absolutely loved getting back out into the field so to speak and interact with all our players.
Week 2 of April was the start of the Easter school holidays. We started off our football fun days with a cracker of a day. Our very first girl's only fun day was a sell-out (as were all our fun days this Easter) and was a really great day. This is a session we've been planning for a while and it proved very much to be a great decision.
We followed that fun day with one at Sankey then over to Winwick for a couple of days and then finished off back at Sankey. It was fantastic to see all the old faces and even better to see some new ones. All the fun days are great to do as we get so much from the kids and we know from the reactions of the parents, that they have enjoyed it as they are all tired out at the end of it.
Then we were back onto Tuesday night walking football and it's been non-stop from there.
It's great to be back doing what we love with the people we love doing it with. We are looking forward now to reopening our remaining sessions and to putting on more projects. But we're doing it #OneGameAtaTime.
