Replace vandalised junior boat

Today should have been a great day. We were due to welcome the High Sheriff of Shropshire to announce we’d won the Community Volunteer Award for rebuilding our grassroots junior squad at Ironbridge Rowing Club. We had a breakfast session planned to discuss our racing and training for the season ahead and to announce the date for our next community junior Learn to Row programme in April.

(A programme open to all local teenagers in the area; real grassroots.)

Instead, we were gutted to arrive at the clubhouse this morning and see that one of our large junior boats had been deliberately untied, dragged off its shelving, run up and down and smashed up. We were looking forward to celebrating building an incredible squad of junior athletes from the kids in our community, we were faced with the news that some of them won’t have a boat to get on the water in. Throughout the winter and the dark nights, these young people turn up regularly and train hard and are supported by a team of volunteer coaches to do this. We are not elite. We are not a club with deep pockets. We are as grass roots as it gets and we work hard to fundraise and find ways to get enough equipment for these juniors. Most of our boats are more than 20 years old and we take real care to keep them going. The criminal damage to the boat was caught on CCTV and has been passed to the police. There are two young people out there who cycled over to the clubhouse and wilfully vandalised a boat.

We are hoping to fundraise to replace the boat. The cost of the boat is far more than the eye watering target set here but we hope we can find a second hand one to keep these juniors rowing. We would also like to add security measures to stop this sort of mindless vandalism. We hope that this will raise awareness of how rowing is a sport for everyone in our community and an understanding that it requires a great deal or time, sweat and tears to make it so. If you can, please donate the equivalent of a cup of coffee and help us help the young people in our community to have another club and opportunity to get outside and be active.