Saturday sees us start our home games for the pre season programme, since March of this year there has been plenty to test our resilience, as if the pandemic wasn’t enough the sports club and changing rooms suffered severe water damage ,our new mower is stranded somewhere in Europe and our old one broke down leaving us with nothing to cut our pitches with ,so really a typical close season at Stocksbridge Park Steels. However we have to be thankful we are safe and well and hopefully we can be get back to normality.
We are now starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel with the mower repaired and thanks to a lot of hard work by our small group of volunteers the changing rooms look much better, we have been fortunate to have secured some Football Foundation funding to help with some of our improvements.
Our volunteers have been superb again over the last few months putting in six and seven hour days at the ground to get work finished ,some of the work you may not notice because it is behind the scenes but the ground is looking tidy with more planned for the near future.
We recieved a massive boost recently with the news that our sponsorship agreement with Eco-Power Environment will continue again this season , and we are looking forward to working with Louis and his team in trying to take the club forward.
Sponsorship deals have also been agreed with JDM metals and Aspire Independent Support Group for our reserve and under eighteen teams and a big thank you to both companies.
The profile of the club is also increasing and not just in this country our under eighteen shirt sponsor will be a rock band from New York who’s lead singer is named Steele more details on that arrangement will be announced soon.
We have also been invited to do promotional work with Papa John’s pizza ,and last week five of the lads and manager Chris Hilton were down in London filming with V05 hair products and we have our commercial manager Roger Gissing to thank for all the hard work he puts in securing these deals.
Our off the field team is getting stronger and will ho
pefully bring new dimensions to the club with regards to reporting and social media coverage.
pefully bring new dimensions to the club with regards to reporting and social media coverage.
We want to make the Town of Stocksbridge proud of their football team and this season will be our twenty fifth at step four of the football pyramid which is a massive achievement for a club of our size.
It will be no easy task this year with the restructuring of the Northern Premier League but we will give it a good shot to be competitive and challenging in our division. There will hopefully be bigger crowds this year with more local teams and some well supported teams from the North East so hopefully not only us but local shops and restaurants will also benefit before and after the games.
It will be great to see old friends and new back at the Eco-Power stadium in the coming weeks and whilst we have to be mindful of the need to be cautious it will be nice to have some form of normality.
Thank you for your continued support .
Graham Furness
Chairman
