An important role any university plays, and one that many people forget, is working and developing a relationship with the local community. Despite the closure of our Beaconside campus, this continues to be the case in Stafford.
Members of the newly unified Staffs rugby team have donated over £150 worth of sports equipment to the Weston Road Academy, near to the Stafford campus, to help develop their own talents on the field.
Our own rugby team member and soon-to-be student officer Darren Clarke explained how the generous donation came to be:
“As you know the [Stoke and Stafford] campuses are amalgamating, and this will be the same case with the two rugby clubs,” he began.
“The clubs will come together, the players will come together and the equipment will come together. There’s a lot of equipment down in Stafford and there’s a lot up in Stoke, so we decided to go through it all, take anything we needed up to Stoke and dump anything that was broken or dangerous to use.
“Everything else we could’ve sold, but, since there was a school right next door to us and we see them playing rugby when we’re playing our matches, we thought why not give it to them?”
Darren also stressed the importance of good equipment in the development of young sporting students, suggesting that the good work they’ve done might even see some of the Weston Road pupils coming to Staffordshire University and playing for our future rugby teams.
He added: “Sometimes students get a bad rep from local communities, but if we can feed back into them it makes everything better for everyone.
“I was speaking to the coach and they said they were looking into buying new pads and everything anyway, so they were just glad to be able to save a little bit of cash. It’s always good for a wee school, as they don’t always have a lot of money. It was awesome to make a good effect.”
As the Stafford and Stoke rugby teams finally become the united Staffordshire University team, with a greater pool of talent and resources, the future looks bright, and who knows, maybe some of the Weston Road students will be a part of that future.