Football Focus Issue 73 | Page 28

Sunderland City Juniors FOLLOW US ONLINE TWITTER.COM/FOOTYFOCUSMAG Sunderland City Juniors FOOTBALL CLUB Sunderland City Juniors was formed in May 2015 by myself, Phil McGuire and my partner Joanne Campbell. Having decided we wanted to try and give something back to the local community where we lived we formed the club. Our aim as a club is to encourage a healthy lifestyle, help to improve children’s love of the game, create long lasting memories and friendships but most of all increase participation of local children in and around our area in playing football. In just over 2 years the club has evolved from being one stand-alone team to now having eight junior teams, all of these teams are named after Sunderland AFC legends and to our 28 Issue 73 knowledge when we decided to use this approach no other grassroots team were doing this and is unique to SCJ. This is a great way to involve the legends with our teams and has seen Julio Arca come to training, Micky Horswill take the FA Cup to league games and Kevin Phillips join his team for a club photo. All our teams play in the Russell Foster Youth League and this last season has seen huge success for the club’s teams. We have seen seven promotions, two league championships and two league runners up placings. Two of our teams, Montgomery and Arca, are now in the transition of moving to the 9 v 9 format of the game and are very excited to be playing on bigger pitches and learning new formations and rules etc. Our founding team, Sunderland City Juniors Porterfield have had two fantastic years, RFYL placed them in the 6th tier