Exclusive: English Lacrosse Looks to Legacy after Being Awarded Two Global Events
September 25, 2013
By Ismail Uddin
English Lacrosse Chief Executive Mark Coups has revealed they are already in talks with Sport England to initiate their legacy programs for the 2017 Women’s World Cup and 2018 Men World Championship.
England were recently awarded the 2018 Men’s World Championship and earlier this year won the bid for the 2017 Women’s World Cup and Coups is looking for the legacy programs to be up and running.
He told iSportconnect exclusively: “We are in discussions with Sport England about legacy programs around these two World Championships. Discussions will be on-going for the next 12-18 months.
“We were very lucky in 2010 to secure legacy funding off regional Sport England which was based in the north-west for that tournament (2010 Men’s World Championship) and we managed to see an increase of participation off the back of that work.”
“We are in negotiations of putting in place legacy funding into those programs, saying that we have already started some of the legacy work. With the partnership we have created for the 2017 Women’s World Cup we have already been working with Surrey Sports Park and the university site there. Last week a full-time development officer started work in the area to develop participation and that’s part of the whole package of the delivery of the 2017 Championship.”
Coups also revealed the success of the 2010 Men’s World Championship was a major reason why English Lacrosse wanted to return to Manchester for the 2018 event.
He said: “The 2010 Championships was the most successful World Championship of Lacrosse that has ever been produced. It had the largest number of people, biggest turnover, most amount of teams competing and the international community acknowledged the work English Lacrosse had done in producing a really world class event.
“A decision was taken that we would really like to back that event and try and host it again bearing in mind the expansion in the countries will mean that we’re not going to have that opportunity to host it as regularly in the future so we wanted to take the success we had and build on it.
“Therefore we looked at a partnership working with the Manchester City Council again and with the university to make proposals for an enhanced event on what we did last time. The enhancements we were looking for were things like; improvement in stadia, improvement in facilities like accommodation and improvement in media content. We managed to put a bid together that included those things to the international community and obviously we were very pleased when they awarded it our way.”