• yesterday
Members of FC Britannia girls team in training at Leisure United William Fosters football hub, Ince. The team will be one of over 50 girls teams in the North West to take part in the first ever Wigan Girls Christmas Cup, which will be held at Wigan's Laithwaite Park Hub, on 28th December.
Transcript
00:00Hello, so my name's Jack. We're down at William Foster's. This is the central venue for our Wigan girls football league that gets played on a Saturday.
00:08We set this up at the start of this season in September and it came off the back of last season my grassroots team was playing over in South Manchester.
00:18It was kept care of over in South Manchester but it was time for Wigan to have their own league set up and here we are today.
00:27We have 10 teams in our under-12s league and 8 teams in our under-10s league and the hope to grow that is hopefully in the future.
00:36Over the next few months we are preparing ourselves for the Christmas Cup and that will be a range of 50 teams from across the North West.
00:46They will come from Blackpool, Liverpool, here in Wigan ourselves, all over the North West.
00:54We did a Summer Cup in July which was 25 teams and we've been able to push ourselves on into this position now in December where we've got 50 teams coming.
01:04We've got a range from under-7s all the way up to under-12s so it should be a brilliant day of football.
01:09So the importance of girls football is massive for myself. Obviously we've got loads of boys stuff going on over here in Wigan and the girls side is ready to grow.
01:19It's taken a big light with Ella Toon's pitch being down here. It's an amazing role model for the girls to look up to and also promoting the game of football itself in Wigan.
01:29We are only at the start but I do feel like we're the right people in charge that we can push it to be at the highest of its development and be at the top across the North West.
01:39Hi I'm Jess, I'm 11 years old. I play for Britannia Hoops and I've been playing for two seasons now.
01:48What I love about this team is that all the girls are really nice. I love playing for the team. We're all really positive and we're really competitive.
01:56Having a girls league is awesome. All the girls in this league get to play football and we live really close by. We don't have to travel far away now. It's really good. I love playing in this girls league.
02:10So any teams or any clubs that are looking at developing girls football, myself I will help you out to get these started. There is a lot of lads teams already in the area and we're hopefully looking to push girls teams across into these clubs.
02:22If you have the desire to get that set up I am here to help you out. A big thing for myself would be start off, get them going. Girls are all interested in playing football.
02:32We've got a wildcat session that is due to run down here on a Saturday morning so any girl is welcome to come and join and play football.