The pandemic has hit under-served communities particularly hard and our local delivery partners in South Yorkshire have worked tirelessly to support local children who have been severely impacted.

Like many community sport providers, Rotherham United Community Sports Trust (RUCST) has been forced to adapt to constantly changing coronavirus restrictions, challenges with facilities and increased levels of need amongst their participants.

RUCST run two Levelling the Playing Field sessions: a weekly Premier League Kicks football session which is mainly attended by children from Pakistani backgrounds, and an all-female boxing session at Rotherham United’s New York Stadium, which attracts girls from ethnically diverse communities.

The leisure centre which had been the venue for the Kicks session was turned into a Covid-19 testing centre and for a while the sessions were homeless and restricted by the lockdowns. Luckily, some new pitches built in the ethnically diverse area of Eastwood came to the rescue.

“Finding facilities has been tough and the ever-changing guidelines around what you can and can’t do indoors and outdoors has been a bit of a nightmare,” said Trudi Race, RUCST Inclusion Manager.

“We were very lucky that the opportunity came up to move to the new pitches in Eastwood, which was an area we’d targeted in order to be most inclusive. It’s an outdoor space so it’s a lot safer than the indoor sports hall.

“For a period, due to the Covid rules, the only thing that we could continue was disability sport as that’s all that was permitted. It was like a little loophole. But many other children went unsupported.”

The Kicks session in Eastwood is now attended by 10-20 participants each week. The LtPF girls’ boxing session (pictured below) will resume in September, but over the summer most of the participants have instead gone to a summer camp hosted by local WBC and IBO world champion Terri Harper.

“We had to stop the indoor boxing sessions due to the regulations and it’s been like that constantly over the last 18 months,” reveals Trudi. “The stop-start nature of sessions, the changing guidelines and all the Covid procedures have been very unsettling for our staff and participants.

“Historically, our sessions have been ‘turn up and play’ but trying to get the cohort of people we’re trying to attract to book online, especially on the Kicks programme, is very challenging,” says Trudi.

“We have got round it eventually by jumping into the future and using QR codes. I think young people are now used to the fact they have to give their details before they can join in with anything.

“That has actually benefited us slightly in terms of obtaining details, which is often difficult. We work in an area of Rotherham called Ferham where the majority of children are from Roma/Slovak background and we’ve always had difficulties getting personal details from them. They know now though that they have to give that information if they want to participate.”

Trudi highlights mental health, frustration and boredom as issues she has seen escalate among young people in the last year and a half. “I deliver mental health workshops and when I’ve asked about Covid they report things like sleep difficulties, increased anxiety and being fed up because there’s nothing to do.

“We’ve worked with the local police who signpost us to areas where there has been anti-social behaviour, including large groups of young people throwing bricks at buses etc. During periods when we couldn’t deliver any activity at all, we’d go into those areas and do outreach work. It can be challenging, but when we ask what activities they’d like to do, they at least feel as though they’ve been listened to.

“As things return to just about normal, I think people are just happy to have some sort of provision and get a little bit of structure back in their lives.”

Just a few miles away in Sheffield, another of our South Yorkshire local delivery partners, Unity Gym, have also experienced difficulties maintaining levels of support for children in their community.

They have conducted doorstep check-ins, phone calls, outreach work and food parcel deliveries to support under-privileged young people on their radar.

“The increasing vulnerability of young people who were already vulnerable has been a concern for us through the pandemic,” said Unity Gym director Saeed Brasab.

“The challenge for us was quite a lot of our delivery was face-to-face. We had to sift through to get to those who were more vulnerable and tailor the package of support accordingly. We had to be quick, responsive and adapt our support so we were still reaching out to young people and their families.

“When everyone was locked down or furloughed we were engaging with them to the best of our ability – and that included taking food parcels to those who needed them, while recognising that they would feel there was a stigma attached to receiving them. We also offered grief support for those who had lost loved ones, as they wouldn’t be able to receive that anywhere else.

“It’s been a very tough time for this community and for ourselves. We don’t get a lot of funding, so not knowing whether we could be sustained going forward was a challenge. Ultimately though, we’re very well connected in this community [Broomhall, near Sheffield city centre] and people round here rely on us heavily. Disappearing is just not an option!”