A new grassroots football club is aiming to put Birkenhead "back on the map".
Children from Birkenhead Junior FC will lace up their boots for the first time when the new season kicks off next month. The club is the brainchild of chairman Jon Fowler, 42, who, over the past five years, has established himself as an experienced coach on the Merseyside football scene.
He told the ECHO : "I’ve grown a few teams during my time, setting them up with managers and things like that. One day my friend said to me, ‘why don’t you set up your own club’, and I started to think it was something I could do.
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"I was planning on doing it next season but things gathered pace so quickly in terms of communication with the league and the FA that I just decided to pursue it. We're hoping to have five or six teams when the season starts in September.”
Jon, from Claughton Village, wanted to create something that was intrinsically linked to his hometown, and quickly set about trying to restore kids football in Birkenhead Park after a 20-year exile. He said: “I had a chat with a guy from Birkenhead Park and told him our plans for the club.
"I told them they had pitches that weren’t being used and I said I wanted one. He put me in touch with the council and we’ve ended up with two pitches and they’ve said, as we grow, they’ll accommodate us across the park.”
He added: “I used to live across from the park 30 years ago when there was football being played there, but that was more adults. I don’t remember kids football being around for years.
"We had a friendly game on our home pitch last week and its absolutely ideal for kids football. We even had people walking past with their dogs stopping to watch us play.”
Clad in their distinctive yellow and black strip, Birkenhead Junior has already tasted success in a couple of pre-season tournaments. And the burgeoning club is quickly gaining local recognition, with Jon even being congratulated by a stranger in Tesco for helping to bring back kids' football to the park.
The unprecedented heroics of England's Lionesses at this year's Women's Euros has sparked a growing demand for opportunities for girls to get into the sport. Although Birkenhead Junior is currently boys only, Jon is keen to develop a girls' arm of the club in the near future.
He said: “Our teams at the minute are all boys, but its not specifically set up that way - it's just how its ended up. I’ve got a coach who’s coming on board who's going to be running our first girls team, because his little girl wants to get into football so he came to me and said he wanted to help and create that.
"Rather than having a mix of genders, it will be great to have a solid girls team which can be entered into a girls league. Then they can progress and make their own name moving forward."
While Birkenhead Junior FC seemingly has exciting times ahead on the pitch, Jon is also committed to developing a legacy within the community that extends off it. He said: “Birkenhead is classed as a high poverty area so our vision is to try and get hold of a couple of youth centres across Birkenhead to offer free football to kids in the local area one evening a week.
"Some parents can’t get their kids to training and matches because they can’t commit and things like that, so we just want to have a couple of development hubs around Wirral where our coaches can put in extra time, so every kid can turn up for free and just have a couple of hours for fun. That's our next step for the community."
He continued: “We want kids to be part of a team and feel like they belong to something. We’ve got so much we want to do to help the community.
"We want to put Birkenhead back on the map and show its not all bad here. There’s a lot of good people who help each other round here and we want to make sure this club is still around when we're long gone.”
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