Sport England needs to focus on Medals

Sport England puts all its money into grassroots and development but forgets about the older athletes and female athletes.

Sport England is an organisation created in 1997, which focuses on increasing participation in all levels of the sport development continuum, working with UK Sport and NGB’s.

They do this by helping people and communities get sporting habits from a young age and foe life, no matter age, ability, background, religion, gender, disability, and mental health.

Sport England runs a range of organisations, This Girl Can, Sainsbury’s School Games, Sportive, all targeting different areas of participation levels and offering a range of sports involving football heavily as it one of the most popular sports.

Their aims and objectives are to, protect existing facilities and enhance quality, accessibility and management of facilities.

But, to also provide new facilities to meet new demands and enhance the spot overall to make it more attractive.

I believe, that This Girl Can dose enough to get women involved in sports, however they don’t help out with any funding or finances. They put on all these clubs and events for women to get involved, but they aren’t free and this is something that isn’t explained in advertisement. So, they aren’t giving women the full opportunity to get physically active.

All funding come from the national lottery, 18.9mil goes towards NGB’s from 2017-2021 to go toward grassroots and development.

£300-£10,000 is put into different organisations and programmes to get people into sports and becoming more active.

However, because the money goes into organisations and put towards building facilities or equipment, the money isn’t seen by individuals. This means in a way it isn’t benefiting athletes that don’t need support with training, when the issue is paying for it.

Because the funding goes towards grassroots and development it means those that go professional or involved in individual sports funding themselves become harder and there a decrease in participation.

In terms of Women’s participation in sport there has been an increase due to the organisations partnership with This Girl Can

Football

Sport England focuses on grassroots level football and wanting to train the next generation. It has a partnership with St George’s Park by developing its elite and community football by bringing it all to one place.

By letting the grassroots earn and train at St George’s Park it means everyone get the experience of using elite equipment and getting the best sporting experience.

This also means enhancing football coaches and increasing the number of football coaches at different levels.

St Georges Park is a place where training to be a coach. By having better coaches and more will increase participation and performance. The put £3 million pounds of their money towards setting up St George’s Park.

Football is a male dominate sport and only the best get the opportunity to go there, what about the development of England Netball and the women are bringing home medals.

I believe Sport England should look into sports that aren’t as developed, that are just struggling at grassroots level and look to improve their facilities and involvement.

Instead of looking for medals and results they should investigate people’s lifestyle and well-being and what they can do for the people and not medal tables.

If it is about results, then think about the sports where medals are made at world cups and the Olympic games and not with popularity.

The argument is, should money be pumped into sports that gets the most attention or where results are being made and medals won?