Congratulations are in order for lifelong Addicks’ fan, sports journalist and CAST member Tash Everitt. who has just been named the club’s ambassador for Her Game Too.
Her Game Too is a voluntary organisation run by female football fans to advocate gender equality in football. Starting out as a social media campaign, Her Game Too began as the brainchild of twelve founding members in the spring of 2021. Their goal was to raise awareness of sexism in football and take steps to erase that. Over time, this campaign grew into a more formal movement with a network of ambassadors across clubs at all levels of the game. These clubs span the length and breadth of the UK and its various leagues from Larne outside of Belfast to Montrose and Hearts up in Scotland and then back down towards Everton, Leeds, Brentford and a lesser known London side by the name of Millwall.
Charlton have not yet agreed to become full partners of Her Game Too but the appointment of Tash is an important first step towards this. Across the British football landscape, there’s a growing awareness that clubs need to broaden their fan base. This means that they need to bring in more of those groups who don’t always attend games in the flesh. At some clubs, women, ethnic minorities and the young are prime examples of that.
Here at Charlton, thanks to our long history of being a family-friendly club, we do seem to attract support across all age groups and genders. Historically that has also been reflected in various organisations and roles associated with the club, from Valley Gold to here at CAST. There is though still some work to be done in this area. In a reflection of society in general, sexism is creeping back into public life, most often through social media. Anyone following the recent discussions around the naming of our Women’s Team will have seen examples of that. Lots of young women turn away from football as they get older, reducing the potential support base. Whether or not that’s true of Charlton would be interesting to know but hopefully not to any great extent.
All of us want to see a thriving club where everybody feels included. So much good work has been done in this area in recent times, from a championing of LGBT issues to the continuance of our Community Trust’s work in the community. There are many other great causes too that are being endorsed and embraced by the club on a daily basis. By teaming up with Her Game Too, we would be taking another small step in the right direction. Maybe once upon a time Charlton would have been at the head of the table with this. Now, even though we are coming slightly later to the party, it’d be great to see official support for this.
CAST would fully support the club endorsing a more formal partnership with Her Game Too at some point in the very near future. But most of all we would like to wish Tash every success in her new role as ambassador. She is already well-known as someone very passionate and vocal about the club she loves. We expect a lot of exciting things to happen in her tenure and one way we can all help is to endorse the work and aims of Her Game Too, wherever possible. It's always good to remember that every time we go onto social media and tweet or comment as Charlton fans, we are all ambassadors for our club.
Best wishes to Tash and well done on working so hard to make this role a reality.
You can find out more about Her Game Too here:
If you would like to join nearly 3000 Charlton supporters and become a CAST member you can do so here:
https://www.castrust.org/join/