Chichester Coach who helped girl with disability get into waterskiing encourages the sport to 'all children'
Chichester Coach Steve Grice helped Mya Dunning get into waterskiing. He's now encouraging the sport to 'all children'.
West Sussex.
West Sussex.
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00:00I'm Steve Grice, I'm coach here at Chichester Water Ski Club and our Child Welfare Officer.
00:07Here at Chichester we are mainly a boat-owning club, which is why there's all the boats you might see in the background here.
00:13But we also open our doors, we run a kids club here, so even if you're not a boat-owning member you can still come in and ski with us.
00:21And we do a fair bit for the kids, we run after-school kids coaching with Chichester Free School
00:27and we're looking at Bishop Bluffer as well for this coming season.
00:31And then during the kids' summer holidays we run what we call pay and play days for the kids to come in with us, hang out with us for the day.
00:40For the kids that have been introduced to the sport through the after-school club, they can bring friends or siblings etc to come down and enjoy it as well and perhaps learn a little bit.
00:51Ultimately that kind of opens our sport to a wider audience if we're capturing the youngsters at that part in their development.
01:00It's a reasonably cool sport to be doing and hopefully that will engage with the kids, keep them off their tablets and iPhones for even a short period to be outdoors in the good weather,
01:14enjoying the lake and doing something physical as well which an awful lot of children just don't do enough physical exercise.
01:21So when Maya came to us we did take the Access Adventures route which got her into it, they supplied us with the right equipment and then Maya's been a dream,
01:30she's just melted into the club as any other member and I'm sure an awful lot of disabled people that's how they'd like to be.
01:39Once they got their wetsuit on we thought we're all kind of equal, we're all going to be getting wet, everyone here is going to get mucked up.
01:45I might be the exception to that.