Your chance to help fund Bognor Rugby club's new facilities

The new extension will replace the club’s communal shower facilities with individual cubicles more in-keeping with the Rugby Football Union’s (RFU) safeguarding requirements.

Work on phase one – which the club have already fully financed – is due to start in January 2023, with completion expected sometime in May. Club president Leighton Thomas said the extra £20,000 will be used to ensure fittings and fixtures are completed to an appropriate standard.

Previous funds, he added, have come from a combination of grants and money directly raised by the club itself but the extra money will help ensure everything goes smoothly. “We probably had about £150,000 earmarked for this,” Mr Thomas said, “But the fundraising will help us stay on the safe side and make sure that we can finish this project to the quality we anticipate.”

That quality is incredibly important because, as Mr Thomas explained, the new facilities are all about safeguarding the club’s members.

"We need totally separate, totally discrete showers and changing rooms,” he said. “At the moment, for example, if we have a senior match followed by a junior match or a girls match, the facilities would need to be totally empty before anyone else would even be able to step in the building.

"Safeguarding hasn’t been a problem in the past but, because (the RFU) have rightly tightened everything up, our old facilities are archaic. We need separate changing rooms with en-suite showers and so on.”

It took Mr Thomas and the other club volunteers three years to gather the funds needed to start this project, and they were going to start last year, but needed to delay the work thanks to sky-rocketing prices. So, when all that construction is finally complete, the club can look forward to a bright new future.

“Like a lot of clubs up and down the country, we’ve some senior players -we’re down to two teams that we run every single week. But what we’re doing is concentrating on minis, juniors and colts – we’ve got a very very strong colts coming up now- and we hope that, by doing it that way, in two years time, we’ll be back up to three senior teams.”

To find out more and donate to the fundraiser, click here.

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