Wallsend Boys Club (“WBC”) is a long established community sports club in the UK with charitable status (Wallsend Boys Club Charity), that has provided sports facilities and coaching to the north east England community. WBC UK has sports teams for girls, boys, women and men. 80 former WBC players have gone on to make their living as professionals in sport including England players like Alan Shear
er, Peter Beardsley, Steve Bruce and Michael Carrick. Many more thousands have benefitted in life generally from the principles of fair play, integrity through sport and social support that WBC provides. It is called the “Wallsend Way” and it includes things like no dissent to referees, meaning how things are done are more important that the winning. In Hong Kong we have set up a not-for-profit company (Wallsend Boys Club Hong Kong) and we are applying for charitable status so that we can support soccer development for underprivileged children. Proceeds we make from raising money with the visits of names like Kevin Keegan and Terry McDermott (and others to follow) will be put into funding our programme in Hong Kong. The three directors for our not for profit entity WBC Hong Kong are Tony Sealy, Neil Jensen and Chris Vale and we all played for WBC in UK. As WBC HK we would like to continue the same principles and objectives and provide access to sports coaching for less prosperous parts of the Hong Kong community. Our ultimate aim is to give local Hong Kong children the opportunity to play sports and to integrate socially in the process. The three of us based in Hong Kong come from non-privileged backgrounds in UK where we saw sports coaches give up their time for free to provide sporting opportunities. Most sports schools in Hong Kong require parents to pay large sums of money for their kids to join. We plan to make places available to kids whose parents don’t have that money and give them opportunities, and we will be putting a number of kids through the Hong Kong Football Club Junior Soccer programme.
