Our community sports clubs are vital in helping us swim, not sink
WE’RE told each of us has an instinctive reaction to danger. Fight, flight or freeze. I’ve never been tested, but I am pretty certain I’m a freezer. How do you think you would react if, on a visit to your local swimming pool, you saw a five-year-old, fully dressed and thrashing wildly, trying to keep their head above water? You hope you’d jump in to save them, right? Fight. In the UK, I would like to think I’d do the same, after the whole rooted-to-the-spot thing had passed. In the Netherlands, however, where me and my family have been living for the past two years, chances are I would cheer them on: ‘That’s it, you’re doing it! Well done! Now, let me see the soles of those gym shoes and give me 25 metres of backstroke!’
I’m exaggerating, of course. Cheering in a Dutch swimming pool would be entirely frowned upon.
The rest of the scenario is truthful. This is part of how the Dutch learn to swim, not only in outdoor wear, but through underwater obstacles. Why? Because swimming isn’t just about completing lengths of a pool, it’s a survival skill.
It is this view of sport as an essential tool for life rather than a dispensable luxury, that we could really benefit from right now.
Sport is more than a societal, optional extra. It is physical wellness, it is confidence, it is empowerment, and it is community.
Swimming pools facing closure up and down the UK because of the sustained difficulties of this year is not bad for the sport of swimming, it’s bad for all of us. Rugby clubs and leisure centres with uncertain futures are not a concern for the sports industry, it’s a worry for every child whose school does not have its own luxury facilities.
Grassroots sports are not some woolly, cloth-capped, tea flask of quaintness. They are not wooden-benched changing facilities and getting thrashed 7-1 on a freezing Saturday morning for the sheer charm of it. They are active participation in the world around us and a vehicle through which we care about our immediate societies. Need someone to help organise that fundraising raffle for the Under-10’s new jerseys? Put my name down. Want an extra volunteer for the outreach programme, to bring football to deprived communities? Go on then, I have no plans for the weekend. You would like someone to give a hoot about the wellness of others as well as their own physical and mental resilience? I’m all in.
It is not that sports clubs should be the beating heart of a healthy, vibrant community, they already are. My childhood in rural Northern Ireland was fixed on the foundations of grassroots sport. There was the athletics clubs where I spent two to three sessions a week for ten years, burning adolescent energy and focusing my extra-curricular time.
There was the GAA club around which my community was centred, the rugby club where my boyfriend played and where barbecues were held after Saturday matches. Friendships were forged, communities strengthened and essential physical and mental life tools were learned.
I am at a loss to imagine the landscape of my upbringing without those clubs and communities. How would I have filled my time? There are any number of options, but none of them too healthy.
The DCMS is currently examining the risks to community sport as a result of the Covid-19 restrictions. The inquiry, called ‘Sport In Our Communities’, is accepting evidence until December 11. The very real prospect is that we survive coronavirus and plunge into something much more difficult to get out of, a malaise for which there is no vaccine. This is not about saving an industry, it is about saving the wellness of a nation.
It is the cruellest of ironies that, at a time when we are so painfully, tragically aware of the burden the NHS suffers on a daily, nightly, roundthe-clock basis, the preventative medicine of community sports is under such grave threat.
When our souls and our spirits have been deflated by sustained and indefinite isolation, we will be craving kinship. When our bodies are weakened by forcibly hiding away from the rigours of the outside world, we will need to physically retrain. When our mental and emotional wellbeing is bound up in the four walls we’ve been relentlessly staring at, and we have forgotten how to even square our shoulders to the wider world, we will desperately need a vehicle of confidence.
If only some PR guru could find a way to address all of those urgent issues, while simultaneously easing the long-term strain on the NHS. Imagine? What kind of headlines would that hero generate? Except, community sport isn’t sexy. It isn’t headline grabbing. It just works. It quietly gets on with making life better for people in ways that are too subtle for policy headlines.
Elite sport is, rightly, being protected but it cannot be all we have. We cannot make sport an issue of money and class, even more so than it is right now. Investment and government support are essential. What do we do in the face of danger to our collective wellness? Fight, flight or freeze? To allow community sports clubs to flounder is to fall, fully clothed into a lake, having never learned to swim. We will drown.
I am at a loss to imagine my upbringing without these clubs and communities