Thriving club needs a home

‘THE fact that we don’t have a permanent premises, that kind of stops us growing,’ said Stephen Coughlan when he was asked how not having a permanent base affects his club. ‘If we had a more of a structured base, a home where we could be all week, I could encourage more people to come and we could grow it quicker then. It’s hard for me to tell parents, ‘yeah, bring along your seven-year-old we’re training on the tennis court on Tuesday night, and it’s cold’. I can’t really be doing that. We’re almost turning away members and that’s a problem.

‘But we do have a nice small group of dedicated boxers and it’s a great little club. I’m cracking up that we can’t be training at the moment. It’s hard. I’m missing it.

‘First, we were in Go Gym in Greystones and that was great, we trained there four days a week. That was our home. Then another entity came in an took over and they charge higher costs and I didn’t want to be charging our guys big fees or anything.

‘So, we were in Go Gym for almost two years and then that happened so we found a place in Kilcoole, in St. Patrick’s Hall. We were there for a few days a week. We had the run of that for the summer but then there are other groups who come in who were off during the summer and when they came back we only had two days there and we were trying to find other places so we were training in a school hall for a day and we’ve been all over the place since then. Since last September we’ve not really had a stable base. We’ll keep on going and we’ve still got a good group of lads. I’d say we have about 30 lads. There are others who pop their head in the door once a week or something like that but we’ve a core of 30,’ he said.