Your Local Sports Clubs Need You

So I've had a bit of a weekend of sport this weekend, having watched The Sam Lobban Tournament up at Aberdeen Wanderer RFC's pitches on Saturday for a while, before coming home to watch Scotland beat Italy at Murrayfield.

Then this afternoon I watched my 14-year old play for his Westhill-based Westdyke football team, after which I tuned into the All Ireland GAA football final on BBC2.?

For what it's worth, I'd never watched a game of Gaelic football before and I can honestly say it made for great viewing, and incredibly, or at least I found it incredible - it's still an amateur sport. Hard to believe when more than 80,000 descended on Dublin's Croke Park to watch it.

I have to say I love sport. Pretty much any sport really. Watching, that is - I'm not the most athletic these days alas, despite being a competitive swimmer when I was younger. I really must do something about that!

As we all know, there are so many well documented reasons as to why people should take part in exercise/sport. It's good for our health - physical and mental - it helps when it comes to developing or improving our social skills, and it teaches us about teamwork and how to communicate clearly.

So there's no doubt that more and more people should be encouraged to get involved in club sports, at all levels.

However, for that to happen, the appropriate funding also has to be in place to make sure, for example, that lets can be taken out, pitches can be booked, strips are paid for, transport isn't an issue and any accommodation costs can be covered, if required.

At a local level one of the ways that this can be achieved at a relatively low cost is through sponsorship, and potentially small sponsorship packages at that, e.g. sponsoring one strip, home or away, sponsoring training tops or even sponsoring a squad's water bottles.

In Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire we have so many different sports to choose from. I've been to see lots of different ones, and not just those you'd expect. Needless to say I've watched rugby, football and hockey, but I've also watched basketball, baseball and dodgeball. I've been to several ice hockey games and to a number of cricket matches. I've even been to watch some American football.

There's clearly a benefit to these team being sponsored, but the reality is that there are also some really great benefits to the sponsoring business.

Supporting a local team or club can really help you raise your business profile, increasing your own brand recognition. It also lends itself to gathering some great content for your own marketing activities.

Plus it can help position you as a business that cares about the community in which you operates, which in turn speaks volumes about your people, your culture and your values.

Also because sport is seen as being such a positive and healthy activity, your business will be viewed in a similar light, just from being linked to a club.

I believe there are even tax benefits to sponsoring a local team.

And of course - and perhaps most importantly - you get to make a real difference to people's lives.

The bottom line is there are lots of great reasons to get involved, and the reality is that the support of the local business community is very much needed just now, as can be seen by the amount of fundraising efforts and sponsorship requests that go on all the time across the board.

What might not seem like a huge amount of money to a business, can go a long, long way when it comes to buying kit and equipment for a local sports club.

So please think about local sports sponsorship if you haven't ready. It's something that's needed and has real value.

Oh, and it goes without saying that we're always looking for sponsors for our U15s Westdyke 09 Thistle team, so if anyone's interested, please get in touch with me at [email protected]?

I might as well ask - nothing ventured and all that! :)