History of Preston City Trampolining Club
Colin’s love for trampolining began at the age of 14 in a local youth club. After just a few years he began to compete in the North West Region and was on form. He went on to compete at National and Youth International level.
Colin traveled around the country enabling him to train at the best clubs with the best performers, some of who are familiar names at the top of trampolining competition circuit as high performance coaches today. During this time Colin gained his own coaching qualifications.
As family life took over trampolining took a back seat for a while but returned with a vengeance in latter years. Due to the changes within the sport and of the equipment used, Colin acquired his coaching qualifications once again as a coach in 1995 and senior club coach in 2004.
The family moved to Preston owing to Colin’s work commitments in 2002. As with any place Colin lives in or merely visits his first port of call was to locate a trampolining club. He found these to be over subscribed and with incredibly long waiting lists. The seed for founding his own club was planted.
Colin expressed a wish to put back into trampolining all the years fun and skills he had enjoyed and with the help and support of his family over the next three years he pulled together the equipment, expertise and a venue.
Preston City Trampoline Club was born……….
British Gymnastics – our governing body – were contacted and we were put in touch with Mike Locket our Development Office for the North West, who advised us that the best route to take was by going straight away for our GymMark/Clubmark.
Our mission statement was to become an all inclusive community club, offering people in the community the opportunity to enjoy the sport of Trampoline Gymnastics and all the fun, discipline, and social skills that accompanied it. A committee was formed a trampoline borrowed, and with a few posters in the local shops we ran our first session at Tulketh. 20 young people turned up. After a visit to the CVS and help writing a constitution, it took us 12 months of writing policies and attending courses and meetings and we achieved our GymMark. From these first 20 gymnasts, our base of Volunteers was formed and 80% of them are with us today. The Gym Mark is reviewed every year by the NGB, and I am happy to say that we still retain it.
We had financial help along the way from the Area Forum who bought us Safety Landing Modules for the ends of the trampoline, Preston Sports Forum on several occasions who helped us purchase an overhead rig and safety landing mats. – Our gymnasts were making progress and these aids helped them on their way. Preston Sports Forum has also supported us financially to train coaches from our band of Volunteers.
The gymnasts themselves work very hard to raise money for their club, and through bag packing, sponsored bouncing, quiz nights and raffles have been able to purchase one of the trampolines at the club.
During the 5 years we have been running the club has expanded, we have made successful links with the Club/School Links programme. Colin Robson our Head Coach offers taster sessions to primary schools and the club has run two KS2 competitions for these gymnasts. We have now expanded into the Secondary Schools and have run a competition for this group of children. The Club is now in a position to Sponsor these events.
We also have a special session for vulnerable adults.
Primarily we had envisaged being a recreational club with one or two that may want to go on and compete. We still are a recreational club reaching out to the community to come along and have some fun, but are delighted to say that we now have gymnasts that wish to compete and any member of the club is able to do so on reaching the required level, we have gymnast at local friendly competitions, 12 who are now at Regional level and 2 and National Level.
We then had parents and older siblings asking could they bounce, parents saying how they had enjoyed trampolining at school, but did not want to show themselves up in front of their children. The adult class Back to Bounce was formed and is now going from strength to strength.
Colin Robson who thought he would like to put back something into trampolining as a hobby when he retired, has now given up his full time career and is trampolining in some shape and form every day of the week, whether it be at his own club, in schools, or with organisations with young people with learning difficulties.
Colin is passionate about coaching and aspires to return to the sport the success and discipline he gained from trampolining, which kept him on the straight and narrow as a teenager. He finds the children’s participation, progress and pleasure in the sport he so dearly loves extremely fulfilling.