“More than a shirt, feeding a passion for life”
Keep up to date with our news what we're doing in the world of KitAid and sport
Congratulations to Marine FC from the Evo-Stik Northern Premier League on becoming the 5th club to join the prestigious Ambassador Club scheme. They join Chesham Utd, FC United of Manchester, Witton Albion and Stenhousemuir who have previously been invited to join the scheme.
Marine FC have really got behind KitAid, thanks to Community Officer Barry Lenton and Chairman Paul Leary, and they have collected over 6,000 items of kit for us to date. Barry is aiming to increase this to 10,000 as the new season kicks off.
We look forward to a long partnership with Marine and hope to hold a kit collection at a game during the 2012/13 season.
Stegota FC from Kampala staged a match last week which was a rematch of a derby game held thousands of miles away in Lincolnshire. We recently took some kits over to Kampala donated by Stamford FC and Lincoln United who both play in Evo-Stik Northern League.
Stegota set up a match with their fiercest rivals Kazo United, with Stegota playing as Stamford and Kazo playing as Lincoln. The match ended with a 3 - 1 vistory for Stegota/Stamford which gave them the bragging rights for the next few months until they play each other again in the Kampala league next season. The game was watched by an impressive 700 fans.
For more information visit the Stegota website at www.stegotafc.com
Derrick Williams and Lesley Giddens from KitAid attended the final day of the week long Ballysillan YFC footy camp in Belfast last Friday, and had a fantastic day. We have sponsored this brilliant event for the last few years and we are really proud to be involved in such a fantastic project.
Peter Thompson and his team do a great job in ensuring all 65 attendees have a great week and they are looked after throughout the footy camp by 35 volunteer coaches. Derrick took part in the infamous gauntlet run and somehow managed to get to the end of the course without being hit by an exocet shot! Togo won the World Cup and all of the boys had a great week. However, the project is not only about football and Peter and his team offer support to all of the boys and help them with a variety of topics throughout the year.
We are really proud to be a part of BYFC footy camp and already are looking forward to helping in 2013.
KitAid is delighted to announce the launch of our official charity partnership with the Hertfordshire FA charity partner for the new season 2012/13. We have worked closely with Herts FA over the years but it is great to become an official partner.
Derrick Williams commented, I am especially pleased as I think this may be one of the first charity partnerships created with a County FA, and it is definitely a first for us. It will give us access to a lot more clubs in the County and the beauty is, most of them are on our doorstep, which makes kit collections much simpler. We are looking forward to working with the team over the coming season and there are bound to be a lot of new opportunities that come our way. We would like to thank Nick Perchard and Karl Lingham for their help in brigning the partnership together.
Look out on this blog site for more news on the partnership.
Fantastic news from Zimbabwe - 5 of the boys from the Jesuit Mission that we’ve worked with for some years now have been chosen to represent Zimbabwe at U13 level! If that honour wasn’t enough, the team also visited Poland on a recent football tour, so these boys have done incredibly well. Hopefully they are now well on the way to playing at an international level!
We also sent a large donation of kit given to us by a local team - Harvesters FC from St Albans - just before the last boxing up session on 9 June and this week I received photos of it in use in Zimbabwe. Quite amazing how quickly the kit gets from Hatfield to a team thousands of miles away.
KitAid was honoured to be one of the chosen charities at the recent invitation tournament in memory of Charlie.
We would like to thank Jason and Nicole for including us in this special event and to the clubs who donated kit on the day. It was nice to be among friends in memory of lovely little boy and we are proud to be associated with this event.
Well done to Hemel Aces on winning the tournament and this year we have sent some of their kit to Rwanda. Other teams who have supported us involved on the day were Berkhamsted Raiders and Tring Tornadoes.
Charlie's memory will live on through the KitAid projects funded in Kenya, Zambia and Lesotho.
Thanks go out to Lealands School in Luton for their recent kit collection which we will be collecting soon. Check out this fantastic bit of art that they made with the kit!
June finished on a high as KitAid was featured on the Liverpool FC official website as a main news story on Saturday. See http://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/latest-news/reds-reach-out-with-kitaid
Thanks to Liverpool FC, Janet Neville, Vincent O'Brien our Regional Coordinator for Merseysied as well as Andy Carroll for this pair of boots! We will be auctioning the boots in the near future.
We're delighted to have developed new links with some professional or ex-professional footballers!
Paul Canoville used to play for Chelsea in the early 1980's and has an amazing life story. He went from being a pro footballer to a drug addict, living in a car , and has now turned his life around to become a motivational speaker in schools/prisons. He is involved with a football project in Dominica and will be coming to our boxing up session on 14th July.
The Sodje brothers have played for a number of clubs including Stevenage and Bury and are running a Foundation in Nigeria. Derrick met Paul Fairclough, the England non-league manager at Barry Lenton's award event last month who has been out in Nigeria, helping them with coaching. We will be sending over some boxes to Stephen Sodje to help with the project.
Chris Giles is a really interesting guy who has played for Yeovil, Crawley and Aldershot and is currently playing in the Conference for Salisbury City. He collected 1,000+ shirts from fans at all the clubs he had played for and we met up with him last Tuesday evening when he brought his campervan fully loaded with them all to Hatfield. Ian of Football Gambia also cam to the meeting as most of the shirts will end up at this project in the Gambia.
