Further Fencing Fun

I have been taking my plastic swords to unsuspecting victims in the name of o2 again this week. This time, instead of call centres and head offices, it was primary school children from Oldham that got the opportunity to test their swordsman skills and their musketeer career potential.
The primary school children who swapped football and basketball dribbling for fencing lunging yesterday, usually have 3StyleSports running their PE classes but yesterday had the opportunity to fence their classmates in the playground as part of Coppice Primary School’s preparation for the Olympics. 3 StyleSports (@3stylesports) is a youth project that is supported by Think Big and ran by Andy Williams who I met at a Think Big residential I attended a few months ago. He uses the financial and business support Think Big give, to increase sports participation amongst youngsters in the Oldham area, who are given little opportunities to go to after school clubs and other sports clubs because of their financial restrictions.
With the run up to the Olympics, Andy’s aim is to get children involved in lots of Olympic sports so, to fire up their anticipation of the games, I brought some fencing kit for them to try the alternative sport of fencing. One of the great things I saw from the fencing session was the lifting of normal sporting stereotypes. Because there aren’t strong gender associations attached to fencing, unlike dance and football (also covered by 3StyleSport,) all of the kids took it on with a fervour that Andy said he rarely sees from both girls and boys in the same session.
This picture shows some of the children who took part, along with their very own, home-made, paper-mache London 2012 Mascot.