The Huddersfield Junior Football League will be hosting a number of mini indoor girls’ football festivals starting this weekend and running until April.
The sessions will be for girls from the age of six to 10 and will take place across several weekends. Staged at the 5core indoor football centre on the Tandem Industrial Estate at Waterloo, the league is hoping to encourage more girls to play football. Eventually the aim is to set up an all-girls division within the league structure.
The HJFL is this year celebrating its 50th anniversary and wants to mark the milestone by increasing participation levels.
The league is in the top six for players participating in its league in the country, with 12,000 juniors registered with it. They have 95 teams overall which covers Kirklees, Calderdale and some parts of Bradford. There are less than 400 girls competing in the league though and this is something the league hopes to improve.
The league’s Shaun Weatherhead is looking forward to the festivals taking place and hopes that many girls will sign up to them.
He said: “We are really excited about the mini football festivals and hope it attracts not just girls who already play in our league but also girls who haven’t kicked a ball before.
“Obviously with the success of the Lionesses already we want to harness that and start to ramp up our participation for girls in football. Girls have seen this now as a sport where they can be accepted.
“The point of these festivals is for girls to come along, have fun and compete in games which are in a safe environment.
“We as a league are proud of the girls that currently play in our leagues and we had our first all-girls football match take place last year. Now we are hoping to build on this success and move things in an exciting and positive direction.”
Shaun has created his own club called Town Juniors which, despite the name, isn’t affiliated to Huddersfield Town in any way. He set up the club in August last year and has already had over 300 kids registered, 145 of those are girls.
Shaun said: “I have spoken to the County FA and said our plans will not affect the West Riding Girls’ League. We want to build this from the bottom up and run some mini football festivals.
“We will run it and market it through the Huddersfield Junior Football League clubs and through local schools and get girls to come along en masse to play. This will be for girls aged six-10 years old.
“In these festivals there aren’t specific teams facing each other, it’s just girls playing football. We are hoping to get 500 girls to come and take part but if we get more then that’s great.
“We will then be able to go to clubs and say: ‘Look, here is the number of girls that were in your area that registered with us, how about setting up a girls’ team?’
“From that point the hope is we will be able to make a girls’ division in the Huddersfield Junior Football League, something in its 50-year history it has never had.”
If you’d like to register your child for the festivals then click the link HERE
For further details or queries please contact improvement@huddersfieldjfl.co.uk or contact Shaun Weatherhead 07841 632023.
See the poster below for specific times and dates of the sessions.
