Horsham Sports Services’ Holiday Sports and Playscheme Days cater for 5-12 year olds. Our base for this provision is The Bridge leisure centre, Broadbridge Heath where we take advantage of an excellent range of facilities.

Our leading priorities are for children to have fun and to be safe as they do so. Our days cover a wide range of organised and informal sport activities, arts and crafts provision, and lots of opportunity for free play. Effectively we operate like a junior youth club trying to balance provision between the formally instructed and the informally self-led.

Early on each day we have a briefing session to orientate children on the basics of provision such as toilets location, lunch arrangements, behaviour, risks to manage (eg helmets requirement) and care needs (eg hot weather days). It also provides an opportunity to both convey what promoted activities are due to be run that day and consult on what activities children would like to see provided, possibly modifying the finalised plan for the day.

Morning sessions run 8.30am-1pm and afternoon ones 1-5.30pm. Children can attend both morning and afternoon sessions if they wish. Parents may choose to drop-off later and pick-up earlier than these times. 

More formally provided sports workshops are overseen by appropriately trained sports coaches. Arts and crafts provision is generally more informal but there are also instructed sessions on occasion too. We have a weekly prize-incentivized arts competition that children can enter and karaoke and talent competitions also happen regularly.

Mainstream sports we are able to provide coaching and participation for with qualified and experienced coaches include athletics, badminton, basketball, cricket, football, tri-golf, hockey, netball, rounders, tag rugby, tennis and table tennis.

More niche sports we are able to provide coaching and participation opportunities for with qualified and experienced coaches include archery, boccia, croquet, disc golf, dodgeball, fencing, footgolf, goalball, handball, kinball, lacrosse, new age kurling, skittles, sitting volleyball, stoolball, ultimate frisbee and tchoukball. We also sometimes set up an assault course on the grass for children to undertake.

A number of indoor and outdoor sports such as boxing, football, tennis, cricket, badminton, tennis, pool, trigolf, table football, disc golf and swingball are available for children to access under their own steam. There is also streetsport type equipment available such as go-karts, roller skates*, scooters*, skateboards* and stilts* and children can bring their own bicycle to ride on the track (*as long as helmets are worn). Sports wheelchairs are another popular piece of kit and we always have plenty of them! 

We have got lots going on indoors too with a bouncy castle, books, puzzles, board games, lego, building bricks, jenga, play tunnels and computer games available on an access and content-controlled basis (Nintendo Switch and X-Box). Outdoors we like calling impromptu Treasure Hunts and have bug collecting kit for those that like to go exploring around the athletics stadium for insects. We have an extensive range of nerf guns for times when supervised warfare is declared! 

Whatever and however children choose to participate parents can be assured we operate an eyes-all-areas approach within our extensive but secure facility span so whilst children can feel a high sense of freedom and control staff are never far away and not slow to react if there is a problem of any kind.

Download the full activity list for the Horsham Holiday Sports and Playscheme Days