EUTC on top of their new Trampoline

New Trampoline thanks to Sport England

The first week of the academic year is always jam packed with busy sessions, welcoming new members to the club and getting back into some sort of shape after the long summer break.

However, for us, the Trampolining Club, our first week held a special significance as this was the week that we eagerly awaited the arrival of our brand new, Olympic standard, Ultimate Eurotramp Trampoline.  This was the culmination of an intensive application process for Sport England funding that the club embarked on back in December 2015.

Our club membership has grown steadily over recent years and last year it became increasingly clear that we were in need of an additional trampoline in order to continue to provide our members with excellent opportunity to progress in our sport.  However, since trampolines cost anything between £5,000 - £9,000, we were all well aware that raising this money would not be an easy task.

After thoroughly researching our options, we discovered the Sport England Small Grants Fund. The fund aims to support projects that directly help increase participation in sport.  Since an additional trampoline would enable us to have more people trampolining at once, shorter waiting times and would result in more activity per session, it was obvious that this was the perfect opportunity for us.

The application itself consisted of several in depth questions, for which the answers took up over 7 pages of A4.  Our coaches Rhys Goodhead and Steve Walker, along with Charlotte Raymont and Jack Bristow from the AU, all kindly wrote fantastic letters in support of the application.  We supplied as much evidence for the necessity of an additional trampoline as possible, from attendance at competitions to membership numbers over previous years, as well as drawing out a project delivery plan, writing a club constitution and providing detailed analysis of our club income and expenditure over the last 12 months.

 In March, we finally sent off the application and what followed was an agonizing 12 week wait to see if our application had been successful.   Finally in May, we received a much anticipated letter from Sport England, and, to our delight, we had been awarded an incredible £9,000, enabling us to buy the absolute best trampoline and support mats currently on the market – the same trampoline used by Great Britain's Bryony Page to make history by winning on Olympic silver medal in Rio this year!

 Our new trampoline and supporting mats are now installed in their new home at St Lukes’s Sports Centre and are being enthusiastically used by all club members, old and new.  Thanks to Sport England we are seeing the benefits already, with more trampolines we can utilise more coaches which means we are seeing some great training results. We’ve already had huge interest in our competitions this year and it looks like we’ll be taking record numbers to represent the University this year.

Date: 19 October 2016