Great Britain basketball player Arek Deng visited Lampton School, Hounslow to pay tribute to some of the work going on in the borough to develop youth sport.

Since being awarded £5000 from the Balfour Beatty Sports Development Grants with Help a London Child in February, a series of expert-led sessions for volleyball, squash, boccia, disability football and hockey have been rolled out across the borough to expand opportunities for secondary school children, particularly for girls and people with disabilities where opportunities have previously not been so widely available.

Fourteen secondary schools had the opportunity to take part in taster sessions overseen by professional coaches leading to invitation to open trials and eight week training blocks ahead of the possibility of representing Hounslow at the Balfour Beatty London Youth Games this summer.

Hounslow has not been represented at the London Youth Games in girls’ volleyball, squash or hockey in the last five years, whilst the boys’ hockey, boccia and disability football teams have never had the quality of preparation they can expect to enjoy this year.

Over 800 children are estimated to have benefitted from the scheme, which has been organised in partnership with local sports clubs Richmond Volleyball, Indian Gymkana Hockey and Brentford FC Community Sport Trust which is designed to recruit hundreds of fresh club members to make a long-term sustainable impact on sporting participation in the borough.

Arek Deng competed in the London Youth Games for Croydon as a youngster and is the sister of Luol Deng, Chicago Bulls captain, who also competed at the London Youth Games in his developmental years. She was fulsome in her praise of the investment.

Deng said: “Every child deserves every chance to do any kind of sport at all. When kids get involved in sport in teaches them so many things, like discipline and how to interact with other people, which you just don’t get from playing computer games for example.

“The London Youth Games brings together kids from the street to be friends and play together and compete together. Going to my first London Youth Games, I was 13 in 1996 and at that time I was really starting to find myself as a basketball player. A couple of months later and I went to England trials and made it through, so I think the London Youth Games played a really big role.”