Fan-Dance Charity Challenge

With just three days to go I have taken a look back at the journey I’ve been on to get in better shape for my inspireslam charity challenge – a timed race over the highest mountain in the middle of Wales, along the same route the SAS use as part of their selection process. There…

Things to consider on a rugby tour

While the arguments for touring with a youth side outweigh the stress often associated with taking young players abroad, touring with your team is none the less both demanding and challenging as a party leader. To aid the process for you, we’ve come up with a few key points we’ve learned across the past 10…

We’re here to help!

Taking young players on tour and away from home for a number of nights can be a daunting task! That’s why we have decided to launch our very own resources hub. Resources to help you, the party leader, at every stage of the tour and beyond, tried and tested by us to ensure we are…

Staff training at the home of The FA – St Georges Park

Our regional staff and managers made good use of the Easter break and joined together for a non-stop 2 days of training and team building last week. It was a long drive for some of them, leaving early morning but one that was definitely worth it!

St Georges Park – The 105m home of England’s 24 National teams opened in 2012 and has since hosted the England rugby league squad, Montserrat national football team, ECB coaching conference, key partners of ours FC Porto, and even Barcelona CF. After a short team meeting discussing the coming summer term and events that are planned in the diary, a quick change of clothing was needed as we made our way outside to the activity centre.

The activity centre opened in the summer of 2014 and has hosted a number of high profile teams at the centre, including England Women’s team! Tackling 2 activities in our teams, we went from suspended heights to studying our foot patterns, before jumping into the hydrotherapy pool at the Perform Spire centre on site.

Going through a standardised warm up in the main pool, the group of volunteers were then asked to spend 12 minutes alternating between the cold (9’C) pool and the hot jacuzzi. We were even given the opportunity to run on the under water tread mill, used to analyse the foot strike and help identify injury.

Watch our video from the day here…

We’ve had a cracking Easter!

Yet again, with your help, we have managed to operate our highest number of tours ever across March and into April! A huge thanks goes to our party leaders for their commitment to taking their players on tour, to parents for financially supporting your children to go and to the players for their good behaviour…

One month to go!

With less than one month to go before the half marathon, Lydia has given us a brief update on the race, training and her expectations. Having run the Cardiff Half Marathon route for a number of years’ now, I am fairly comfortable with the upcoming race. Towards the end of last year, I joined a…