Ashley Bayes donates his gloves to aspiring goalie
Cheam High School pupil Stephanie Waterman Roberts will be hoping to emulate AFC Wimbledon goalkeeping coach Ashley Bayes by clinching a coveted place at Wembley next week.
Stephanie’s Cheam School today enjoyed watching Wimbledon’s first-team being put through their paces by Neal Ardley in a training session at Tooting & Mitcham as a reward for winning the AFC Wimbledon Girls Cup before Christmas.
And Cheam’s number one received a special surprise when Ashley presented her with his signed goalkeeping gloves. During his long playing career, Ashley played at Wembley for Stevenage Borough and the girls at Cheam will be aiming to do the same by winning the South West regional final at Canvey Island next week.
As well as watching the Wimbledon first-team at training today, Cheam High School girls took part in a Q & A session with players and had their own training session under the guidance of Rob Tuvey, who is a coach at AFC Wimbledon Community Football Scheme (CFS).
AFC Wimbledon manager Neal Ardley paid tribute to the club’s CFS for all of its hard work and he was delighted to help out on the day.
“It was great for the girls to have a day out at a football club so that they can see what goes on,” said Neal. “Our community coaches do a lot of great work and we try and have a good relationship with them. We bend over backwards for them and have first-team players available whenever we can because I think it’s really important to do that as a club. Hopefully, the girls will have gone away from here having had a great experience today.”
We will tomorrow feature a video on our You Tube channel about today’s community event, featuring footage from first-team training.