THE DIFFERENCE MAKERS

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 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

“I would class myself as a Greenhouse kid. I’m London born and bred, my upbringing was quite tough, and table tennis completely changed my life.”

like that. In sport, the most important talent you can have is the capacity for hard work. If you work hard, if you really stick at something, you develop confidence and resilience, you learn to cope with setbacks. You realise that some days you have to dip low in order to jump high. That’s what sport teaches you. You have to be on time, you have to be respectful of other people, you have to train properly, you have to be honest, you have to give 100 per cent – and those are qualities that can set you up for life.

I would class myself as a Greenhouse kid. I’m London born and bred, my upbringing was quite tough, and table tennis completely changed my life. My stepdad, Buxton, played table tennis for Jamaica, but he left the sport behind when he came over to England and met my mum, who’d come here from Ireland. They were both still very young – late teens. We lived in Ladbroke Grove, not a million miles from here, and money was always tight. They started a business together, a cleaning company, and one of their contracts was at Willesden High School. Buxton was walking along the corridor one day when a guy passed him with a box of bats and a couple of nets, and they started chatting. That guy was Jon Kaufman, a legend in London table tennis. Jon and Buxton started a club together, called Progress Table Tennis Club, which became this hotbed for kids from inner-city London who wouldn’t normally play table tennis. It was the most multicultural table tennis club in history, and it went on to become the best table tennis club in the country. That was where I first picked up a bat.

When I was 12, Buxton was murdered. It was a really traumatic time, but without the table tennis club, it would have been even more difficult. I was able to channel my inner anger into the sport. I had a place to go. A community. An environment I felt safe in. I don’t know how my mum found the money, but she made sure I could always get to competitions and play to a decent level, and I got quite good, very, very quickly. I had offers to go professional in the German Bundesliga, but I chose to play in slightly weaker leagues so that I could be here to support my family. I did various jobs alongside my table tennis – I’d do a nine-to-five, train in the evening, and then play in Germany or Sweden or Belgium on the weekends. I became British men’s champion. At one point I was the highest ranked non-professional table tennis player in the world.

I started doing some private coaching while I was still playing, to earn some extra money, and that’s how I met Alan Sherwood, who founded a charity called Table Tennis for Kids. I started working for the charity, which then merged with Greenhouse Sports. programmes to thousands of people in an area Now, the things that my old table tennis club gave me – those opportunities, that sense of community – I’m able to pass on to another generation. As director of coaching, I take an overview of our provision and the pathways through it. I also work with the coaches, sharing good practice. I’m still directly mentoring a few kids who have some extra difficulties going on in their lives. I think that’s important – coaching is something you have to keep practising in order to stay relevant.

There are so many examples of how Greenhouse Sports changes lives, but there’s one that sticks in my mind. It was my first day with the kids at what was a really challenging school. I was walking back up to the car park to pick up some balls from my car when I saw this altercation between a couple of kids. I stepped in and stopped it. After I’d collected the balls, I saw one of the boys was on his phone, visibly upset. I’m trying to talk him down when a car pulls up, screeching its tyres, and this big guy gets out, bristling with anger. It’s the boy’s older brother – it was him on the phone – and he’s here to confront the other kid. I managed to stop him, calmed him down, and said: “I’ll look after your brother, I’ll speak to the school about what’s happening, but whatever you’re about to do right now is not going to help anybody. You could end up getting your brother excluded before he’s even started the school year.”

I went to the headteacher, we had a chat, and that young person stayed with me for the whole day. We played a bit of table tennis. And we carried on playing table tennis. Five years later he was the head boy of the school, with top marks in his GCSEs. His brothers had all gone to the school, always in trouble, grades always quite low. This boy’s experience changed the family’s whole relationship with the school. His younger brother ended up with good grades as well. I often think back to that fight in the playground and how differently things could have turned out for him. Table tennis changed that boy’s life, like it changed mine.

GREENHOUSE SPORTS 35 Cosway Street, NW1 5NS greenhousesports.org