Barrow AFC’s summer holiday camps may have ended last week, but the club haven’t quite finished reaching out to the community before the children go back to school.

Throughout the summer break, the Bluebirds’ Community Trust have been visiting Hindpool Park every afternoon from Monday to Thursday before moving on to Ormsgill, the first time the programme has gone to multiple venues.

From 2-4pm, kids have been free to join in, with emphasis on the word ‘free,’ on the hard courts at Hindpool Park on Duke Street to play matches as well as other games related to football.

Community coach Kane Fitch, whose been sharing duties with Matty Taylor at these informal sessions, said: “The numbers fluctuate, it just depends on the weather and who really fancies coming on the day.

“It’s at their discretion whether they want to come, but we’d still run it if we had one person here or if we had 50 here.

“We do games like ‘power and finesse’ where they get two shots where they have to shoot first time - the first one being a power shot and the second being on where they have to curl it.

“They then do a game call ‘lightning’ where they have to shoot and if they miss, then they have to go in goal and if the person after them misses then have to go in, so it’s kind of like a football hotseat.”

It has been an extremely busy summer for the coaches in AFC’s Community Trust, who ran football and multi-sport camps at St Bernard’s School and Furness College across five weeks.

The workload won’t be slowing down any time soon, either, with the start of the school year coming around the same time as the start of the junior football season, meaning the club’s Performance Centre will click back into gear.

Fitch said: “It’s been really good - Matty has been feeding back every day, as this is my first week here.

“It just gives these guys something to do and it keeps them occupied under my guidance and hopefully we’ve made it more fun for them than just coming down here on their own and playing.

“We start back at the Performance Centre next week and we’ve got some good teams coming into that as well.”