Sheffield Eagles Literacy Kicks

The 2nd May 1998 is a historic day in the short history of the Sheffield Eagles. It was on this day, only 14 years after being formed that they defied the odds and expectations in beating Wigan Warriors 17-8 in the Challenge Cup Final. This match is often described as the biggest upset in Challenge Cup history, perhaps in British rugby league as a whole.

Gareth developed a specific programme using using the 1998 Challenge Cup win as inspiration for the young people to produce a piece of writing.

At most of the workshops there was someone there linked to 1998 to share their memories with the children and talk about life in Rugby League. We’re grateful to Mark Aston, Keith Senior and Cory Aston for spending time with the schools talking about their memories and experiences. Linked to this, we brought together all aspects of the work of the Eagles Foundation by also offering a tag rugby league coaching session for the class on the same day. Thanks to the funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we were able to offer these workshops free of charge, therefore throughout September we worked with nine primary schools to deliver 21 literacy workshops and 21 coaching sessions involving over 650 schoolchildren.

We're still in the process of collecting all the feedback and reviewing the project but we know from the conversations we've had with the teachers and children how much they've enjoyed it.

The enthusiasm from the children has been amazing to see, many of them never having heard of the Sheffield Eagles before. They’ve been inspired by the historic 1998 Challenge Cup win and the people involved to write some brilliant articles about that day. They loved being able to meet a sports journalist, to have a different lesson to normal, learning about the Sheffield Eagles, having a chance to write in a new way and of course the most popular – receiving a free pencil.

It’s been great working with Gareth on this project and we’re already looking at working with him again next year, if we can raise the funding, as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Club.

Some of the schools featured the project on their social media.

Below you can see some examples of the writing produced by the children.

The success of the project was recognised in the 2024 Sporting Heritage Awards where the Heritage Project and Literacy Kicks were the winners of the Celebrating Sporting Heritage in Schools Award.