Following the announcement of Boris Johnson in the House Of Commons this afternoon, we are delighted to tell you that we are planning to resume all our English outdoor leagues from March 29th.
The announcement that England’s third lockdown is being eased in four stages includes the provision that grassroots, organised sport can resume from that date and that is exactly what we are gearing up to do.
Following the lockdown which ended in the summer of 2020, we took all necessary steps to make sure our leagues were Covid safe, and had our Risk Assessments signed off by every venue.
All those measures – which you can see below and included not car-sharing, paying for leagues with card not cash and players not being within 2m of the Match Officials – will remain in place when we resume again from then end of March.
After the first lockdown we saw a huge influx of teams – October was the largest amount of new team entries we have had since records began – and we have already begun preparations to extend many leagues to cope with the anticipated surge in demand.
We also have well over 50 new leagues planned to kick off in the late spring. A few of these, notably Gloucester, Macclesfield, Leicester and Crewe, will be ready to start almost as soon as we get the go-ahead.
New Business Manager, Ben Schumann, explained that this massive expansion of the league network was needed to get the country moving again. “12 months of lockdowns have had a terrible effect on the physical and mental health of the nation, but hopefully today marks the beginning of the end of this darkness. We say to everyone: Thank you for your patience, let’s make this a summer of sport we will never forget!”
Your Area Manager will be in touch over the next few days with the latest, but if you want to join a league near you right now, click here: https://www.leisureleagues.net/search
