The Ropes Crossing Strikers FC have donated $1,500 to Ropes Crossing Public School, after the local club successfully ran free football clinics over three days to all the students recently.

For the second year running, the partnership saw volunteers from the Ropes Crossing Strikers FC attend the school to assist with the program. This year the program reached over 800 students at the school, who were taught basic football skills including dribbling, shooting and game play. The purpose of the clinics were to promote a healthy active lifestyle to students and to give them a fun introduction to football.

“As a club, we donated $1,500 to the school. $1,000 of this money will be used by the school to subsidise the cost of sports buses each week for PSSA sports. The remaining $500 is split up and used to reward the students who excel throughout the year. These funds will help subsidise the cost of that students chosen sporting activity” said Adam Hartas from the Ropes Crossing Strikers FC.

The club are currently formulating a business plan to move forward over the next 3-5 years, which includes the school’s program as one of the major components. Their dream is to grow and push the program out to the schools. “The biggest hurdle we face with growing the school program is having the people available to go out to the schools and run it. Currently, we have some club coaches, players and committee members taking time off work and volunteering their time to run the clinics for us” explained Hartas.

The Ropes Crossing Strikers FC are also looking to implement a new in-house program that will help develop their players. This program will be introduced this year as development squads, where they have hired qualified coaches to come in and coach a couple of teams to help players who want to excel to the next level of football.

At present, they run an in-house academy, where they have partnered with a local football academy to provide skills training for players of all ages to join. This program has been in place for the past two years and has seen several players progress from grassroots football to representative football within the Blacktown and Nepean regions.