Dartford Grassroots Youth Football Lead Darren Corley’s monthly round-up of the grassroots side of the club

Dartford’s youth teams kicked-off the 2024-25 season last month, with more of our grassroots teams in action than ever before. 

Three new Under-7s have joined the Dartford family broken up into team White, team Black and team Yellow. The sides were brought in by Warren Ball who is a part of the Mini Darts model. 

Mini Darts is a pay-as-you-play model in which you can eventually become part of the Under-7s.  Each of our new teams have received their new kits and it’s brilliant to see them ready for action.

Going up an age bracket, we’ve had an Under-8s team come over increasing our numbers to three teams at Under-8s level. Being able to take on another local team who wants to play for Dartford is really encouraging and a testament to our facilities and programmes.  

With four new junior youth teams, they can take advantage of children’s season tickets which is another perk of joining the youth set-up, alongside flag waving on first-team match days. 

We believe watching and being involved with the first-team and perhaps seeing what could await you if you continue with us just creates that deeper link between the club, the first team and its youth teams. 

We also now have a girls’ JPL team playing Saturday football. JPL Warriors are in the highest standard of girls’ football locally and Danny Groves is doing really well with them. 

A really exciting development for us this season, however, is the introduction of a ladies Under-18 side for the first time at the club.  

This will help to try to bridge the gap between Connor and Macca’s women’s team and our youth teams. It’s really good to have that pathway.

The development side of the women’s game has stopped this year so we thought it was important for the Under-18s to be there to help bridge that gap between the youth section and the women’s first-team. 

It’s really good to see Connor and Macca get involved and they even invite some girls to first-team training and talk to their coaches about implementing the ideas from the women’s team into their own training. 

Thanks to our on-site facilities, they will train at Dartford at the same time, so we get a really good crossover and that is quite rare for clubs at our level. A lot of local clubs just can’t do that. 

The gap between these two teams is quite big at the moment, but we believe that with what we are doing, some of them can make that step up to first team when they have finished their time in the Under-18s. The key for us is a pathway. 

From the men’s side, we have had some success stories from the academy and we think it’s really important girls and boys can go all the way from the Under-7s up to the first-team.  

With the season underway, two of our sides have already made their marks in the league.  

The Under-15s are currently second in their Kent Youth league drawing with top side Welling 1-1, a few weekends ago. 

The Under-16s follow suit in second place and unbeaten, winning their first three games.  

We now have roughly over thirty teams who train weekly and play matches over the weekend among our youth teams. We are excited to see how they get on in the coming months with their seasons well and truly up and running.

Riley Finch

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