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INCLUSION ———— MatT’s story ———— and enjoyable sessions where people can play Matt’s story highlights how our ‘Every Player with others with the same disabilities as them. Counts’ disability sport sessions consistently Prior to lockdown, we delivered 13 weekly give him a safe and enjoyable space to be football sessions to 200+ participants catering physically active and spend time socialising for participants with a variety of impairments with his friends. It is also a “lifeline” in terms of alongside supporting our visually impaired and his mental health and wellbeing, giving him the cerebral palsy teams as they took confidence to maintain a job and part in their respective national spend quality time with his young leagues. family. We want to challenge During lockdown periods we perceptions about disabilities and continued to engage via Zoom promote confidence that transfers FOOTBALL HAS football sessions as well as into other areas of participants’ HELPED ME lives: Matt is a fantastic example REGAIN MY LOST keeping our Facebook Groups active. We provided over 300 of this in practice. In his own CONFIDENCE Zoom calls in 2020 to over 100 words: “Without the Trust and the disability participants. We also other guys in the team, I’d never delivered 44 activity packs which included have imagined myself taking on a full-time job football and specialist equipment to ensure 2 years ago. Football has helped me regain there were no barriers to people taking part in my lost confidence after finding out about my the online sessions. You can check out our full decreasing vision. It’s got me back being me.” range of sessions here and if you or someone People with disabilities are twice as likely to be inactive than those without disabilities and we you know could benefit from the sessions, let want to reduce this disparity by providing safe us know! ■
CAMBRIDGE UNITED F.C. V STEVENAGE FC