D R M DISABILIT Y SPORT
INCLUSIVE FOOTBALL COMING YOUR WAY DRM spoke to Baroness Sue Campbell about how the Football Your Way campaign in encouraging disabled people to come back to the sport, their way.
With such a challenging time for many sports, how has the pandemic impacted disabled football, from grassroots to the elite players?
I think it is pretty common knowledge the pandemic has disproportionately impacted people with disabilities, on [their] confidence to go out and their vulnerability in terms of getting covid. We have seen a drop off in participation, which is now recovering, but there is still a lot of work to do to get back to where we were. In terms of the Talent Pathway, there has not been as
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dramatic an impact, simply because those are committed individuals, but we weren’t able to access them as regularly. And then for our national teams, a lot of camps that should’ve happened at St George’s Park didn’t happen because of Covid. It also gave us a really good time to take a solid look at our own strategy and think through what we were doing, whether it was good enough, and what more we could do. We had the campaign Football Your Way, which was our way to try and get people to start thinking about coming back after Covid and encouraging them to think about getting out, being active and getting involved again.
disabilit yreviewmagazine.co.uk
