Mountain bike girls win funding for future projects
Four girls from Arran High School’s mountain bike club have secured £3,000 of funding after they took part in a Cycling Scotland school camp.
Lucy Walsh, Joley Allison, Ellie Ewing and Kirstie Kerr took part in a weeklong residential course at the Lagganlia Centre for Outdoor Education just outside Aviemore. The course involved learning bike mechanics, first aid, ride leadership training and bike agility training. The culmination of these activities allowed them to achieve levels 1 and 2 Go MTB skills.
In a statement the girls told The Banner: ‘The week has helped us to be more confident in all aspects of cycling. We have learned how to lead people while cycling and know what to do if something should go wrong.
The main aim of the course was to put across our ideas for promoting cycling in the younger community. We are very pleased to have been awarded the full amount of funding which was £3,000 after presenting our ideas successfully to a member of the Cycling Scotland team. This money will help contribute to several of our future projects.
‘We will be visiting some of the primary schools offering basic maintenance skills. We intend to offer fun and challenging agility courses for the pupils. This will hopefully encourage the primary school children to take up cycling and join our mountain bike club when they get to high school.
‘Cycling Scotland funding will also help train another member of staff to take us out on rides so that we can go out more than twice a week and potentially have different ability groups. We would like to say thank you to everyone involved in our course as we have gained valuable experience from it and had an amazing time whilst we were there.’