Celebrating Community Sport

As regular readers of these posts will know, Tom Williams and I like to highlight and celebrate the fantastic impact of community sport and give a sense of what we’ve been up during the week. So, without breaking from tradition, huge congratulations to Mel Bound OBE for being awarded an OBE for her services to women’s community sport.

BBC news has a great article describing Mel’s journey and her massive impact. "How I built UK's biggest women runners club out of one Facebook post".

We’d love to see more media reporting of people like Mel and others doing similarly incredible things through community sport – there’s a massive list of people out there, and we’d be happy to share it!

Which brings me on to the World Cup. How great is it to see hundreds of thousands of people all coming together for the love of sport. There are of course always issues, concerns, hopes, around the planning and delivery of major events, but seeing Boston embrace Scotland, the world embrace Curaçao, and England embracing attacking football (sorry, couldn’t resist) is brilliant and genuinely life re-affirming. I’m lucky enough to be heading out to New York on Wednesday – let me know if you’re around and fancy sharing the experience.

A final word of thanks to Peter Mackreth for hosting us at Leeds Beckett University yesterday; for your passion and vision in exploring how we could help support community sport across the UK and around the world. I really look forward to seeing what we will do together.