WHEN, aged 14, England’s future netball captain Serena Kersten arrived in Bath to train for the first time, she was blown away by the quality of their sporting facilities.
“I was like ‘oh my God, this is incredible. I want to run on that court’. It’s the power that facilities have for a community because it shows that you value them.
“You think someone really wants me to train here, spend my money here and be here. Just build good facilities that everyone can use – makes sense, or makes sense to me anyway,” she said.
The still relatively newly appointed Assistant Economic Development Minister with responsibility for sport speaks with a passion you might expect from someone who achieved the highest sporting distinction of captaining their country as well as being part England’s Commonwealth Games gold-medal-winning netball team. That passion will surely surface when the subject of Jersey’s own sporting estate is up for discussion around the Council of Ministers’ table.
Senator Kersten’s political responsibility for sport was surely the perfect example of fitting a square peg into a square hole. In addition to that gold medal, she also spent her formative years here in Jersey at Fort Regent and Les Quennevais Sports Centre.
Hands-on experience like that has entitled her to be critical in recent years of previous governments’ sports provision, following the clear-out from Fort Regent. Of course, the boot – or maybe the training shoe – is on the other foot. She is now responsible, and at a time the government is tightening its belt. A challenge, perhaps?
“It makes all of these things incredibly difficult and I’m not the only person struggling with no growth bids. You’ve obviously got the Investing in Jersey piece to come, and I need to learn to understand better what part sport could have to play in trying to fight for some of those funds, but a lot of people are going to be fighting for [them],” she acknowledged.
For the “sports minister”, a further complication comes from the fact that Senator Kersten does not have her own budget. She is dependent on working with ministerial colleagues – not just her own Economic Development Deputy Gerald Voisin, but the Ministers for Education and Infrastructure – to secure change.
But she is encouraged by the recently published Common Strategic Policy and its ambition to “improve the public realm, community spaces and sports facilities across the whole Island”.
She accepts that Fort Regent – where she once discovered her own passion for sport as a teenager – poses a dilemma. It offered a suitable base for many different sports, giving them a “community feel” that Oakfield could never satisfactorily replace. Her own sport netball which uses Oakfield extensively, is under huge pressure and badly needs another two-court facility but she recognises the political reality in 2026.
“It’s also about funding it. It’s one thing to say we need another indoor facility but where does that come from? And that’s my challenge as a sports minister. The Fort is a difficult one for me at the minute to know what the future of sport [could] look like in that facility. Everyone has got lots of different opinions of what should go into it. I would love it to be used for sport and we could be really creative from a sports perspective. There’s so much opportunity there.
“But if it [requires] an investment of a hundred-odd million, then I think that the argument for sport becomes less and less because you need commercial entities that are going to ensure it washes its face. I think that it then becomes a more difficult argument for sport because I just don’t think it would be able to generate the rent needed,” she said.
More practical perhaps is her ambition for investment in facilities at Les Quennevais and at the FB Fields, which she described as “two amazing opportunities”. The latter, which she believes could provide a “hub for sport”, serves not only the athletics community but also a densely populated area with families looking for activities for their children.
It is a theme Senator Kersten develops. Young people must have the same opportunity – “a God-given right” as she puts it – to take part in physical activity. At primary school, where an emphasis on play boosts physical activity, 65% of children are categorised very active but the number falls to below 20% at secondary school.
“I need to understand and get to the core of what is actually happening here and what support do I need to try [to] put in place. We are going around gathering information around facilities, what schools have got, how they deliver their PE,” she explained.
It leads the assistant minister to another preoccupation: how facilities can be made available to the community outside regular school hours? A recent review of 20 primary schools showed that only seven opened up their facilities in this way.
“You’ve got brilliant parks, and we had a great investment in terms of some of those upgrades in various schools, and too many gates are locked. I think it’s about working with schools to get them to understand the huge benefit of informal access to activity; how that can create confidence; how important it is just to go and kick a ball around with your son, and not have someone come out and say get off my field – that leads to a child having a poor experience [which] in turn leads to a lack of confidence and means they don’t go out again.
“So I think it’s about what happens in the structured piece within schools, but then from a facility perspective, what can we do to just up the access and get the school estate more utilised in a controlled way.
“There’s this huge fear that there’s going to be vandalism and that maintenance is going to be really difficult but you’ve got inner city schools in London purposely opening up their facilities after school to try to tackle gang crime. It works because you’re giving young people a place to go, and if that’s happening there, surely we can do it here in Jersey where we don’t have the intensity of those challenges,” she said.
During the recent election hustings, many people commented on the confidence displayed by Senator Kersten before a live audience. Is that something that can be traced to her success on a sports court?
“I think you know that I didn’t necessarily come from a privileged background, so I think I always understood the need to work hard and that was probably a golden thread through my whole sporting career. When I ended up playing for England, no one was going to work harder than me and that drove me into successful spaces.
“Confidence is one part, but then something that I was always grateful for is my mum saying ‘just get on with it, don’t worry about it, just go and do your thing’. Being focused is important and I think I always knew I wanted to do sport. It was a kind of a no-brainer – it’s what I was good at,” she said.
To hear the political newbie speak leaves no doubt about her determination but still perhaps does not quite explain why she decided to stand for the States. She joked that it is a question she has been asking herself since she entered the entirely different “arena” of politics.
But she is in no doubt that the skills she learned as a sportswoman are transferrable to this new environment.
“They are life-skills you don’t even know you’re getting when you play sport. You can take them out into any other industry [or] sector, and that’s the beauty of it. I know how to talk to people; I am a leader; I’m solutions focused; I can think critically and on my feet; I understand high performance; I understand culture and all these things you need when you go into businesses across the world.”
Her latest challenge is, as she puts it, “to learn the new rule book”, embracing the life of a new States Member governed by the Assembly’s Standing Orders and the role of an assistant minister in government. But one key lesson from her past life – one she mentioned a number of times on the campaign trail – was the importance of collaboration. On a netball court there are specialists – shooters, defenders and mid-court players – yet they all need to know each other’s game plans to succeed.
It offers an important parallel, she explained: “When you think about that politically, there’s so much going on where if we can just convene and communicate effectively, it means that we strengthen our ability to succeed. I suppose that’s my formula, and I’ve learned it through sport,” she said.
All those things that frustrate the general public – wasted resources, unnecessary meetings, duplication of effort – are all anathema to the successful team player. Think creatively and look for innovative solutions instead is what Senator Kersten has absorbed naturally over her sporting career.
This week’s announcement of additional funding to help some of the Island’s sportsmen and women travel to next year’s Island Games in the Faroe Islands is perhaps an example. But Senator Kersten would like to see a more co-ordinated approach to such support in future.
“It’s going to help some people but we have to be realistic that for some it’s too late already and they’ve said no to their discipline. It’s great we’ve been able to do what we’ve done, but I think we should be doing more. And not just because it’s sport, but this is the wider benefit of feeling invested in and of wanting to represent your nation. What we do from a sporting perspective is part of our identity as an island. We’ve got great triathletes, we’ve got great athletes, great rugby players and football’s on the up. Why would we not want to invest in that?,” she asked.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the assistant minister – who also has responsibility for arts, culture and heritage – takes such a view of Island identity. She moved to Jersey when she was just eight from her native Peterborough. What struck her was just how accessible sport was to her: the impact of that was incalculable.
Now, with two young children of her own, she wants to ensure that the benefits of physical activity and sport are available to all.
“I do feel really passionate about access and just getting people in and getting them playing. And it doesn’t have to be complicated – you don’t need lots of complicated policies and things like that. It’s just about communicating its importance and we’ve got a huge opportunity to create a legacy on this Island,” she said.
