Cramlington gymnastics club receives £5,000 grant

The club provides a range of fun and exciting recreational gymnastics classes starting from pre-school to competitive level.

Currently, the gymnastics club has around 450 members, aged four years old and up.

After receiving the grant, the club installed a competition-standard 14m x 14m sprung floor in its 16,000 sq ft gym hall on the Northumberland Business Park West to provide local gymnasts with appropriate and necessary practice facilities.

Its recreational sessions enable children and young people to develop the core skills across all gymnastic disciplines, including artistic gymnastics, sports acrobatics and tumbling, rhythmic gymnastics and trampolining, and has a variety of equipment including balance beams, bars, vaults and tumbling tracks available to help them master new skills.

The club’s competitive teams regularly take part successfully in regional and national competitions against clubs from all over the country, while an eight-strong team also qualified for, and attended, the 2019 IAIGC World Gymnastics Championships, held in Nashville, Tennessee.

Gemma Wilkinson, founder and head coach at Northern Gymnastics, said: “As well as helping our young gymnasts develop their sporting skills, we’re also very focused on the personal benefits they gain through learning about things like teamwork, patience, confidence, commitment and friendship.

“The quality of our facilities, our coaching and our ethos is reflected in the numbers of members choosing to travel to Cramlington from right across the region to learn with us.

"We’re proud to be helping more and more children to become physically active from an early age, to the benefit of their long-term health prospects.”

Jamilah Hassan, community manager at The Banks Group, a renewable energy, property and minerals firm, said: “Northern Gymnastics provides unrivalled facilities for anyone who wants to give the sport a go.

“We’re very pleased to be able to support yet another community sports club in an area where we’ve worked for more than four decades and wish everyone at Northern Gymnastics every success for the future.”

Anyone from a community close to a Banks Group project who is interested in applying for funding should first contact the fund manager via [email protected] or call 0191 378 6342 before applying for a grant to check their groups eligibility.