North East Sport started in 2008, in the middle of the financial crash. I was a foreman steel fixer on big construction jobs all over the country, away from home most of the week, with two young lads I wanted to see grow up. When the crash came I was the last one on site to be made redundant. So I took the bull by the horns and started coaching my two and a few of their mates in Southwick. That became North East Sport Youth FC, and in November 2009 it became a Community Interest Company. From Southwick we moved to Hendon, and since 2014 we’ve been at Monkwearmouth Academy.
There’s a harder part to this that I’ve spoken about before. My son Callum was stillborn. After losing him I knew how important it was to be there to see my boys grow up, and I’ve never forgotten it. North East Sport came out of that as much as it came out of the crash.
Eighteen years on we’re with over 900 people every week, from toddlers upwards, with more than forty adult volunteers alongside us. We’ve been on the brink more than once. We’re still here.
I left school with E grades at best and I’ve worked since I was fifteen. What put me on the right path wasn’t a classroom. It was my family, and a site boss called Kevin Kelly who saw something in me and told me to get on with it. That’s what we try to be for every kid who walks in: somebody in your corner who expects you to turn up. Sport is how we do it. It isn’t why.
We keep prices as low as we can and find funding for free places wherever possible, because no child should miss out because of what’s in their parents’ pocket.
If you want to know what success looks like to us, it’s a young person who comes back years later, on the right path, with a work ethic, who respects how they were treated here and does the same for somebody else.
That’s the whole reason we exist: to be there for Sunderland’s young people, week in, week out, so they grow up with a solid foundation and become good people.
Peter Curtis, founder