THE DIFFERENCE MAKERS
THE DIFFERENCE MAKERS Introducing the people behind Marylebone’s vital charities and community organisations: Jason Sugrue, director of coaching at Greenhouse Sports Interview: Mark Riddaway Portraits: Orlando Gili
Greenhouse Sports is a ‘sports for development’ charity. In practice, that means we use sport to improve young people’s life skills and provide them with opportunities. We work with schools in areas with high levels of income deprivation, mostly in inner-city London. We put a fulltime coach into each school to provide extra-curricular activities for any student who wants to take part. Together with the schools, we identify young people who might benefit from more targetted help, on or off the court, then coach those individuals more intensively. This 31 — MARYLEBONE JOURNAL / ISSUE NO. 95
means you’ve got someone who’s looking closely at the whole child, getting to know everything about them, and using sport to help them improve. We also deliver a sports programme for people of all ages through the Greenhouse Centre, our community sports centre here in Marylebone. Our five main sports are table tennis, basketball, tennis, volleyball and cricket. But it’s not really about the specific sport, it’s about the coaches. We try to find coaches who are not only at the forefront of their sport (many are ex-internationals) but are also really committed to developing young people. We look for people who can relate to the young people they’re working with. That’s so important – kids are smart; they know straight away whether someone is genuinely interested in them. We’ve been going for 20 years now and the evidence of our impact is very strong. Every year a young person in our programme will attend school an average of eight days more than a classmate who isn’t. That alone has a massive effect on their grades. We see an improvement in so many aspects of their lives: academic performance, attitude, sense of community. We worked with Bath University to set up a framework known as STEP, which has four strands of development – social, thinking, emotional and physical – and we regularly assess our impact in each of those areas. Kids often think it’s cool to look like you have talent, to appear to be effortlessly good at something. But sport isn’t
