Club Update: The Future is bright!

The club would like to provide everyone involved with Pontefract Collieries from our Juniors to our disability set up right to our Men’s and Women’s senior teams with the following update, showing where the club is at the moment and where we hope to see the club go in the near future.

We currently provide football for 36 teams. We have a very successful first team who are four promotions away from the football league after two promotions in recent years. Also, we have Academy teams, Education Scholar teams, grassroots boys, mixed and girl’s teams, our new women’s team and our Pirates who are made up of our players with disabilities. In recent years our Pirates have taken part in three Great Britain Special Olympics games and Mencap European Championships where lots of our players medalled.

We are very proud of all our football teams, but we are also a hub of our local community through the Food Hub we created in the pandemic. That was just the start, since the food hub was created we have also become one of the latest Andy’s Man Club destinations in the Country and we continue to explore opportunities to help our local community.

Since the summer Holidays we have run a Happy Holidays programme through Wakefield Council where we will provide Free School Meal Children with free activities, lunch and a family meal to take home every night. We also provide free football and multi sports coaching every Monday evening for children with special educational needs and who are from low incoming families.

We are also educators, we have a history of helping NEET: Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training through various Traineeship schemes we have run through the Football Club and our Engineering business. We have also created a Sports Scholarship Programme where 6th Form
footballers’ complete education alongside their football development. The courses they complete allow progression to university and we have plans to offer foundation degrees in the future. The courses we offer could easily be adapted to other sports.

In October we also opened our Alternative Provision which is going from strength to strength. We work with students in Year 6-11 who struggle to access mainstream education. The intent of our curriculum is to prepare young people for the world of work. We want to excite them through their passion for sports or engineering to have something to look forward to after high school. We prepare young people for the world of work by facilitating the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to succeed in a career in sports or engineering. KSBs underpin all the new apprenticeship standards and are key to an apprentice successfully passing their work-based course.

We Never rest on our laurels however, and we are currently working on the following projects;

• A new stand (The Shed End) (grant awarded) – Plus we are also looking into the options of a 3G pitch being installed.

• A disability centre – From working with our Pirates for years we know that many of them love the football we provide but need to be physically and mentally stretched more often. We want to create them a hub where they help shape what the provision will look like.

• A boxing gym – We are located in a deprived area and there is no boxing specific gym in our Town. The gym would also be used by our football players including our daily pirates and our Alternative Provision children. The gym will be a fantastic way for all to let off steam and get rid of frustrations.

• Renovated football pitches – Our bid to the Football Foundation is about to be submitted and once approved (highly likely), the work will go to tender. This will ensure all our players have improved surfaces to play on.

• A community centre – Our local Council and nearby coalfield land developer fully support our bid for a new community centre to be built on our site, due to the amount of support we are already giving our local area.

• A horticultural centre – A horticulture centre will be created next to the new community centre. This will be run by local volunteers who we already have in place and again will give our Pirates and AP students another skill and initiative to be involved in.

• A skate park – Again, we are the preferred location for a skate park by our local council due to the work we are already doing in our community.

We are more than a football club and this is a great time to be involved, I would like to personally thank every single person who contributes to this great Club. Up The Colls!

Tom Wiles – Vice Chairman