Pitch priming at St Anne’s

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL: celebrating the St Anne’s grant which will upgrade the club’s pitches are chairman Dave Berry and under-sevens players Jayden Smethurst (left), Jack Bibey, Kian Gibbons and Sam Nutter.

OLDHAM St Anne’s is laying the foundations for a bright future.

The Higginshaw Road club is using a grant of £87,500 to carry out vital drainage work on three pitches.

The club aims to significantly increase its junior intake from the present number of 300, and open up the facility to other sports.

Drainage work is already complete on the youth pitch and on a piece of reclaimed land which, next year, will be used by 12 to 16-year-olds. The diggers will move on to the main pitch, used for open age rugby, after the Oldham Junior Cup finals on November 16. All three sites are set to be up and running by March, 2015.

Saints chairman Dave Berry said: “We had a grant of £65,000 from Sport England, which was then topped up with £22,500 from the Rugby Football League.

“It has all happened in an unbelievably short space of time — it doesn’t seem five minutes since all the paperwork went in.

Though Saints are renowned for bringing through young talent — Kyle Eastmond and George Ford among them — they are now looking to entice additional sports such as netball and rounders.

“We want it to be available for the wider community and to do that we need a good mix of different sports, not just rugby league,” said Dave.