An article explaining why I started to build my website Uneed2getoutmore.
There is a sport, activity or pastime for everyone.
My sixteen year old daughter is a very, focused young lady, no slouch academically she expects good grades and she works hard to get them. She enjoys the outdoors, music and has a sense of humour that makes her popular with her peers. She has a career path set out ahead of her which involves getting placed at a good university. Those are her plans, obviously as parents we encourage her, but she knows what is expected in order to achieve her goals and structures her life accordingly.
With the competition for university places at such an extremely fierce level young people have to prepare themselves at an early age, it is not only enough to achieve academically, they also have to develop an all round package in order to stand out from the crowd. We are very fortunate in the respect that some of the things that stand youngsters in good stead our daughter enjoys, she has been learning to play the guitar, having given up on the flute at an early age, she attends a youth group who help in the community and go on outdoor expeditions, hiking and camping overnight, unfortunately they are not as frequent as she would like due to school commitments. The only thing that she was lacking, if anything, from the desired Curriculum Vitae was a physical sport, something to keep her fit on a regular basis and attain physical achievement.
Now when I was at school, some however many years ago, you tended to be grouped into two types, good at sport and not so good at sport, well, I do not think much has changed and I suspected from a couple of parent evening chats that my daughter was firmly in the second group. So we started to suggest to her various sports and activities to have a go at, she wanted to do something which would give her fitness but was not the mainstream sports taught at school, this was a dilemma, so I started to research this and it was not easy.
My research and various suggestions eventually led to Kayaking, so now that we had decided on kayaking we needed to find a place to go, not living by a river or lake with a kayak club located down the road some more research was again needed, eventually we found a club and as a matter of coincidence one of the instructors we knew. My daughter and a friend set off for a practice session at a nearby canal and she took to it like a duck to water, if you will excuse the pun. So having found a sport she can do and enjoy, it demonstrates that she was only in the second school group because like so many others she had just not found the right activity for her, thus the end of the story, or maybe not.
All this research got me thinking, why was there no popular site out there with all types of sports and activities, come to think of it, a site featuring any type of activity or pastime, a site that also provides a list of local clubs, with not just a link but a bit of information about them, so that is how I started, I have had some help on the way and it has been a huge learning curve, but I have built it:
Uneed2getoutmore sports, activities and pastimes site with a club finder directory capable of displaying local clubs grouped by activity and found by radius search with information about each club, a link to their website and an image.
The site of course will never be finished but I am compiling information all the time and any club can list, so if you are involved with a club please visit it and list it. If you are looking to try something new then visit, you never know how something can enhance you if you never try it.
