WESTBURY Youth FC have secured £4,000 to modernise the club’s changing room facilities and help fund coaching badges for their staff.
Money from the grant, which was confirmed at the latest area board meeting of Wiltshire Council on 25th November, is to be spent on cladding the outside of the changing room and equipment storage room to improve the aesthetic of Redland Lane as well as looking at installing ‘football stop netting’ to stop balls from finding their way into neighbour’s gardens.
Aaron Whiting, chairman of Westbury Youth FC said, “When I inherited the role of chairman, Scott Howse (the vice chairman) and I had a vision for the club going forward. The first idea would look at sorting all of our coaches’ mandated qualifications through the FA, essentially to make things even safer for the kids. We’ve got about 210 kids on the books now, so it’s a fairly large club.
“The other part is that we feel after looking around at Melksham, Chippenham, Calne and Devizes, they have all got facilities that are vastly better than our own. We want to improve the club from a facilities perspective as much as possible.”
This is the fourth time that Westbury Youth FC have been invited to an area board meeting to seek funding, and improvements made in the past include installing new football goals, adding security fencing to make the area safer, constructing a new café for fans to use and updating the toilets.
Aaron added, “We’re moving in the right direction but we’ve still a way to go before we reach the levels of some of the clubs around us.”
Gordon King, a Westbury East councillor and also a Wiltshire Unitary councillor was in attendance at the area board meeting, and said that the football facilities in the surrounding towns had been achieved by developer-led contributions. He suggested that as an area board, the group could do something to make sure Westbury Youth FC ‘gets on the radar of Wiltshire Council’ so they are considered in the exact same way as the other towns.
After discussions of how much money the area board had left in the budget, a proposal was moved by cllr Mathew Dean to offer the club the full £4,000 which was approved by the board.
