Hi Everyone,

We are the University of Cumbria Netball team, the only competitive netball team over the five campus’ that our university has. We compete in the BUCS league on a Wednesday and train twice a week, Thursday 8-9pm and Sunday 6-7pm. But unfortunately, due to paying for transport to games and not having enough income,from the way it looks the team may have to be shut down in by the end of this year.

This year a new committee has taken over and we don’t want the opportunity of being able to play netball to be taken away from students in the future years to come. Our main goal is to get enough money to be able to travel to games and not worry about how much it will set us back. The reality is that being a university student already is stressful and can cause mental health problems for a lot of people. Sport is supposed to help promote a healthy state of mind but at the minute it is just causing more stress than is needed. We do not need to worry about funds for the team when we don’t have funds as university students ourselves.

Secondly, we do not want to have to forfeit our annual charity netball tournament. We invite all students on the campus to join us in competing against each other and raising money for a charity of our choice. The tournament means a lot to us as a team, we all decide together where we want to raise money for, the last two years have been for Mind UK, due to the amount of students living with mental health problems and Dementia UK because a few of the girls families were suffering because of it. Both years we have raised just over £150 for each charity, which we know isn’t the most amount but it is our contribution.

Any funding would help towards to keeping the team going.