The Sussex Thunder are committed to promting the sport of American Football, not only through our own club, but also through schools and other clubs through Sussex and the surrounding area. One day we hope to have enough football clubs in the area to have local leagues and tournaments in addition to the national ones the Thunder already compete in.

If you have 5 interested players and an adult or two willing to put in the effort, starting a new club can be one of the most fun and rewarding things you can do, but this can be a daunting task when you don't know where to begin. We know all about that - the Thunder juniors started with just 2 keen players and 2 dads, and in just 4 years built up to the point where we know have some of the best junior teams in the country.

So if you want to start your own club, we're here to help in whatever way we can to get you on your feet. Some of the ways we can help are :

• Help and advice on setting up your club including; what personel you need, time and effort required to run the club, child welfare issues, joining the league, insurance, costs and funding, transport, short term loans of kit, and anything else that may come up.
• Applying for lottery funding for purchasing kit
• Coaching and Training. Although we can't do it all for you, we are happy to come along and help with coaching and training until you're happy to run with it yourself. We can also help traing your coaches in the rules of the game and how to coach football.
• Anything else you can think of

So if you're ready to give it a go, or would like to know what is involved, just contact us and we'll see what we can do.

Special information for Schools

If you're a school, or an interested player who would like to get the game into their school, either as part of the curiculum or as an after school club, we'll be happy to do all of the above for you as well. But as a school team, we can also offer help and advice on taking advantage of several special options for schools. These are :

• The NFL (National Fooball League) offer school teams a number of free incentives when starting up. These include free demonstration days held at your school to get the kids interested, free kit for playing, and free courses held at your school to teach your PE personnel how to coach American Football.
• There are several ways schools can extra money for funding and sponsorship.
• School teams can also enter the NFL Schools Championship competetion. This is a national competition, and depending on how well you do, you vould progress to play the Scottish Schools Champions for the UK title, then on to the European competition held before the NFLE World Bowl every year, and even possibly the World finals. This is the only competition we know of where an ordinary school team can end up competing against schools from all over the world. And because the sport is still relatively small in the UK, there is a real chance that your school could end up competing internationally.

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