Super Success at DFY Sports Summer Camp!

Football at camp.

We have had a fantastic four weeks at Salusbury Primary School running our DFY Sports Summer Camp. This year saw us growing even bigger with an average of 80 children per day attending. Thanks to our partnership with Brent Councils HAF Programme and our own fundraising we once again managed to extend our offer of free spaces to over 50% of attendees from disadvantaged backgrounds. We managed also to increase the number of SEND places available which meant that all could attend who needed to.

This year saw us introducing new sports to the children thanks to the addition of some new specialist coaches. Boxing and self defence classes were added to our offering and were really popular with boys and girls alike. Skateboarding proved a welcome addition again alongside all of the old favourites - football, basketball, cricket, tennis, badminton and lots more. While we faced some challenges from the weather (where is summer exactly?!) we were lucky to have indoor space to utilise allowing us to carry on playing all day.

Camp includes a healthy hot lunch and snack and we were lucky to have our fantastic cook back on site cooking up a storm every day. We were very grateful to have been donated some lovely snacks and meals from Ellas Kitchen, the organic food company which really helped us with our food budgets.

Over the course of the 4 weeks we had visits from several providers who led the children through some really fun workshops. Positive Wellbeing took the children on a journey through health and wellbeing with a fun and interactive workshop. This was designed to help the children recognise when their peers might be in need of a little support and to equip them with the skills to build those supportive positive relationships.

Beezee Bodies joined us for a day provided their brilliant nutrition workshops, teaching the children all about just how much sugar is found in all the fizzy drinks they might consume. The children were really engaged and excited to learn about healthier food choices.

Finally Take her Lead a team of professional cricketers can to join us to run a cricket workshop for the girls with the aim of getting more girls interested in and playing cricket. The session was great fun and a brilliant introduction for the older girls in particular.

Altogether it has been a brilliant four weeks which was all made possible by our team of wonderful coaches. We are lucky enough to have a big team of dedicated coaches, all specialists in their fields and full of fun & enthusiasm for sport. It was really inspiring to see how they formed positive mentoring relationships with some of the children over the course of the camp and we hope to use this experience to feed into the planning for the mentorship programme we intend to kick off in 2024!

Please get in touch with josie@dfy.org.uk if you would like to know more!