We spoke to the primary education manager at Chesterfield Football Club about the T-shirt project and how the school students at Mary Swanwick’s are working with the club and our college students to create football shirts that will spread awareness about the LGBTQ+ community.
Our students are taking the school student’s designs and using their expertise to transfer them to design software that will allow the club to be able to send them to print.
‘We really just want to educate the next generation of fans. We want Chesterfield Football Club to be accessible to anyone.’
We spoke to the education manager of Chesterfield Football Club about the project and how it came to fruition.
‘Essentially we want to make Chesterfield Football Club as inclusive as possible. Part of that is from education in classrooms at primary schools. The idea is the workshop I deliver in schools is about equality, how everyone is equal, we looked at LGBTQ and black history and other forms of discrimination that people face and footballers face. The idea was then to design a t-shirt for the footballers to wear during the warm up at the upcoming match to raise awareness about how everyone is welcome at Chesterfield Football club.
We have 7 children so each student will have 4 t-shirts printed of their design for the 18 – 20 players. These will hopefully be worn on the game against dover in about a month’s time. The children will get their own t-shirt printed too and an invite to the match. The college students will get an invite to the match too.
The text we are using on the t-shirts is ‘be an ally’ which is basically, be a friend. Its visual, its impactful. Football fans in general have a bad reputation so our job as a business is to educate the next generation of fans.
The project was available to the whole of upper key stage two at Mary Swanwick’s in Chesterfield. The students from the college then chose their favourite designs and then those students came up for the day today.’
Grace and Tyler spoke a bit about their designs and how they are excited to see their t-shirts on the players at one of the matches soon.
‘I’ve decided to draw the rainbow laces and the LGBTQ+ lettering on the front. I came up with it all myself. Rainbows are really nice colours and patterns.’ Grace has a season ticket so she’s looking forward to seeing her t-shirt on the pitch.
‘I put football is for everyone and be an ally on it.’ – Tyler
We can’t wait to see the final printed t-shirts and the players wearing them on the field.