Disability Football

For many years, disabled people have been spectators, as others have enjoyed the highs and lows of playing football. But in recent years The FA have developed a number of variations to the traditional game allowing virtually any disabled person to play, and to enjoy the thrills of taking part.

Sevenoaks Town Juniors FC launched their own disability football coaching initiative in 2010. We ran a specialist disabled football course at Valence School and shortly after ran another one at the Royal London Society for the Blind Dorton House School.

This coaching was so popular and well received that we embarked on an ambitious and exciting new football project in partnership with the Kent FA.

Kent has an extensive and rapidly growing disability football development programme. To date there are forty affiliated male teams and four female teams. Despite this there is still a need to encourage more visually impaired players, who currently only play in schools, to get into local grassroots clubs.

Disability football in Kent is reaching the stage where there is a need to create impairment specific teams to compliment the range of disability initiatives currently in place. This will then form the base to feed county, regional and national teams.

The club hopes to extend the work we have been doing at RLSB Dorton House where we provided twice weekly coaching for 24 children who will become the foundations to us creating three new disability teams, which would involve a minimum of 40 players. These will be an U12’s team, an U16’s team and an adult team which caters for players who are sixteen and older.

From this project we hope that the Kent FA can establish a Kent representative team that can compete against other VI teams from across the south east region.

We hope to build upon and expand the excellent disability football programme currently run by the Kent FA and raise the profile of disability football not only in West Kent but across the county.

By doing so we also hope to raise enthusiasm and interest in the disability football competitions of the London 2012 Paralympics Games.

The club want to do their part to create a legacy for future generations of visually impaired players. It is hoped this project will engage those young people who are too often overlooked when it comes to sporting opportunities.