HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF – PART SIX

It most definitely wasn’t a case of once bitten twice shy when in April 1987 the YDA re-launched itself as a fundraising organisation during yet another time of crisis at the club. Given that Mike Lyons will always be regarded as something of a demonic figure at Blundell Park, it is perhaps ironic that it was apparently the former manager’s enthusiasm which founded the revamped YDA, but so it was.

Their motto had changed slightly from “Through Youth to Success” to the more streamlined “Success Through Youth” and there were mainly new names on the committee, including Dave Boylen and John Tondeur, but the aim was the same, i.e. “the promotion of sporting and athletic activities amongst young people and in particular the promotion of Association Football by the support of Youth Training and Youth Recruitment Programmes of GTFC”.

Early fundraising activities included a memorabilia sale, committee members competing in a fun run, a fashion show and a matchday bucket collection and by November 1987, the YDA was paying the expenses for triallists and providing wet suits for the Colts.

By January 1988, the YDA was “becoming an essential part of the Blundell Park make-up”, although later that month their column reported that during a pre-match collection, “a lot of people saw the letters ‘YDA’ on the buckets and wondered what they stood for” and soon after commented that “one of the most important things in any fundraising organisation is to get yourself known. If you cannot bang the publicity drum for yourself, then you cannot expect anyone else to do it for you.”

Later that year, the YDA paid for the U12 and U14 teams to visit Ayr for a tournament and supplied the School of Excellence with plastic footballs and by the following season, the arrival of Alan Buckley saw the players, management and staff of GTFC all joining the YDA. However its membership still stood at only 170, which given the importance of what they were doing seems pathetic when membership was only a fiver a year.

By the start of 1989, the YDA had taken on responsibility for financing the School of Excellence. £2000 to £3000 was needed to ensure that the SOE and the Colts were provided for and triallists were financed and so the bucket collections, jumble sales and other fundraising activities continued because “a successful youth policy requires continuity. It must never again be allowed to cease”.

Regrettably, if the programme is anything to go by, the publicity drum, so crucial to the organisation’s success, began to be banged with increasing infrequency during the early 1990s. As with the YDA’s previous incarnation, this coincided with a period of success in the club’s history and presumably complacency had set in. So the programme columns became irregular and then non-existent, with only the occasional mention in passing of what a great job the YDA was doing in helping GTFC develop its youth programme.

Clearly the YDA was still raising money until at least 1996, when it handed over the keys to a new minibus to then Youth Team Coach John Cockerill, who wrote that the club “are indebted to the YDA for their support and funding... [their] backing is so important.”

So why the hell aren’t the YDA still in existence? Fair enough, youth football now receives funding from national sources, but given that GTST has in the last year or so funded kit for the youth team, paid travel expenses for triallists and sponsored six youth team players and the player of the month trophies for the School of Excellence teams, clearly that funding does not provide for everything that the SOE and youth team need.

The fact is that the YDA should still be around, but the reality is that it isn’t and we should all regret its passing.