St Helens Walking Football will celebrate their 10th anniversary at the beginning of next year and preparations are well underway as they approach the milestone.
The initiative was established in 2015 by the sport development team at St Helens Borough Council and the group now run two sessions a week on a Monday and Wednesday.
The club has been a cornerstone for the region’s walking football community which to many is their chance to continue to play the game they love.
CEO Peter Fitzpatrick said: “I’ve been involved since the second week. In January we will start to celebrate the anniversary and have got plans for events we can run through the year.
“We started to get more serious so we took over and formed the club to ensure we could support our own rather than rely on the council. We wanted to have our own say in when and where we played. The aim is to publicise the game and attract more members and we can better control that ourselves.”
St Helens Walking Football are celebrating their 10th birthday at the beginning of next year so we paid them a visit to see what walking football and the club is all about. Hear from CEO Peter Fitzpatrick in the video below.https://t.co/r3SgrdselH
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The club now has over 100 members with an average of around 40 who come to each session to play with footballs provided by former Juventus and Arsenal star David Platt.
St Helens Walking Football first targeted men over 50 but that has been adapted to include women and some younger players as well. These players are made up from a range of ages and personalities from those in their twenties to 84-year-olds.
“It’s designed to help people who come back to football who played when they were younger or haven’t played at all to be welcome and comfortable.”
There are also people with all sorts of physical differences such as an amputee who plays with a prosthetic leg, a player that is registered blind and people with multiple knee replacements providing a safe and comfortable environment to play football.
Fitzpatrick himself has suffered with injuries but has gone on to fulfil a dream of representing Ireland on an international stage.
He said: “I’ve had both knees replaced and can play again now so it shows that if people want to carry on this game allows you do that and with the best will in the world you cannot play normal football with those types of injuries.”
It is not just about the football with the community and its people the central focus of the club. The sessions end with the group gathered around in the coffee shop sharing cake and engaging with each other to enhance the social side of the club.
There are some walking football clubs that focus on the competitive element and enter into competitions, but St Helens Walking Football are more interested in the social side of the game.
Fitzpatrick said: “We want to play for the fun of it with the idea of social wellbeing and the obvious health benefits that come with it. We play socially for our own benefit and play against like minded teams such as Burnley FC’s side. We want to accommodate our members and make it inclusive and fun.”
The social wellbeing is the most important part of the club and Fitzpatrick owes a lot of their success to the efforts in that department especially over the challenging couple of years during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
He said: “One of the reasons we are relatively successful was because of our WhatsApp group. Our members all joined and during the difficult covid period we could keep everyone together through things such as weekly quizzes and keeping the social links between our players. Our Monday sessions took off after the restrictions were lifted because of the community we had built.”
