In these ever-increasing dark times for our Non-League clubs, Sevenoaks Town have announced plans for a community expansion at Greatness Park.

The proposals submitted to Sevenoaks District Council include six changing rooms with showers, toilets and storage facilities, along with referee and first aid rooms, as well as providing inclusion for a gym, a meeting room and flexible function room that can be used by the club and community groups.

The building will also function as additional covered standing and seating areas, bringing the club in line with current regulations.

First team manager Micky Collins is naturally thrilled by the plans as he explained to KSN. “It’s really positive and in these dark times it’s nice to see some light,” he told us.

“It’s something that the Club has been working on for a long time and they’ve got it to the next stage now with the plans in for planning with the Council. Hopefully, we’ll get some support behind it and it’ll go through so that we can set about getting it built.”

“Because we’ve got an “outside” pitch which is utilised already which is maintained already by the club rather than the Council doing it, we need to incorporate more changing rooms to facilitate it as we’re already using the 3G inside the ground with kids playing on there already when they start at 10.30, when the next set come along for their game, there’s nowhere for them to change.”

“So as the club has grown, it’s become more of a sticking point especially when you’ve got ladies and girls playing. You can’t juggle it, so we needed more changing rooms for quite a while, so when you throw in the outside pitch as well, we’re short of changing rooms which these plans have done.”

“Everything has had to be incorporated without us going too mad on scale, so we’ve had to keep it nice and tight so that it keeps in with the surroundings and we don’t upset the neighbours!”

“But as a club, we’re so big now, it needed to be a certain substantial size just to accommodate us and keep us going really. If we didn’t, we’d have to go to different sites to play all these games which is just stupid!”

“We’ve had good feedback from a lot of our neighbours – a lot of them have kids who play at the club, so that helps so we’ve been very sympathetic as what we’ve done as a club before we put the planning in after consultation with them to see what they want from it.”

“They’ve told us that they want a community hub which we are trying to build – they want to be able to go down there to such a lovely park to walk their dogs with a café open in normal times where they can sit outside and congregate.”

“They’ve asked if the pathways will be better and they will; is the parking going to be better and it is will it be lit at night (at times) so that it will be safer and it will; there’s a lot of aspects that we’ve got to tick boxes before we even contemplate football and I think we’ve done that, and it will be aesthetically pleasing on the eye especially for the neighbours looking across.”

“There’s a lot of pluses to it, so as a club if we want to maintain our size and what we’re doing for the Community – and we’ve always said that. I came in there for the project and the Chairman has always delivered what he said – I do the football and he does the rest of it, and so far, it’s worked!”