Rotherham United

Over the past week Rotherham United Community Trust has been celebrating the achievements of women and girls in football.

Celebrations started with their home game against Aston Villa on the 4th March where they invited partner clubs and their own female teams to get involved in the match day activities.  This included the U11’s team playing a community game at the half time interval, young players being ball-girls, and over 100 girls doing a lap of honour at half time.

Following this, each female member of Rotherham United staff took part in an interview where they talked about their role within the trust (the interviews can be found online).  We caught up with Megan Higgins, Women and Girls’ Coordinator at Rotherham United Community Trust who said: “Working in a predominately male environment, we wanted to promote the importance of females within our Trust, we also wanted to highlight the job opportunities available for ladies at a football club”.

International Women’s Day took place on Wednesday 8th March and Rotherham United Community Trust continued supporting the cause by engaging local primary school girls in a ‘fun filled girl power day’.

Organised and lead by Megan, she wanted to incorporate lots of different activities for the girls: “We split the day in to two different sections, in the morning we held a fun activity session with six stations and throughout the afternoon a female football tournament”.

The football stations focused on health and well-being, as well as developing football skills.  The day was topped off by a surprise visit from England U23 and Chelsea player, Beth England who got involved in photographs, auto-graph signing, and a Q&A with the players.

Rotherham United hope to continue to inspire women and girls through their multiple sports programmes by highlighting opportunities for women to get involved in sport in the local community.  Megan also added “We hope by promoting our International Women’s Day, we inspire other females to take part and explore all of the sporting opportunities available for them”.

For further information about other Rotherham United Community Trust programmes, please contact Megan Higgins on mhiggins@rotherhamunited.net or visit www.rucst.co.uk.

The Community Trust are welcoming women to get involved in their latest programme ‘Fit for Summer’ which takes place every Tuesday 5:00-6:00 pm at the stadium (flyer below).

Bethany England is pictured with Miller Bear and the girls who took part in the day’s event.