A good number of our players started out playing walking football back in 2015/16 going to sessions organised by Sky Blues in the Community at venues in Coventry and at the Bedworth United ground.
A group of us thought it a good idea to start a club of our own and shortly after, Bedworth & District WF was born with about 12 or so members. SBitC were looking to drop the Bedworth venue around this time so we gratefully continued to play there and call it our home ground.
Russ Watkin was a huge driving force behind us and we continued to grow our membership under the Bedworth name.
However, after a while we took the decision to move to our current home at The Alan Higgs Centre in Coventry, which is also the home of the Coventry City FC academy where the facilities are excellent and include an outdoor 3G pitch and a full size indoor pitch that we use in the winter months giving us the ability to play all year round irrespective of the weather.
Although now firmly based in Coventry, we kept our name as Bedworth & District WF, in hindsight, we could and probably should have changed our name then, but it was not a topic of discussion as the club was flourishing.
Move on about 4 years and another Walking Football team based themselves at our old venue calling themselves a similar name to ours. We were now faced with a problem because when we arranged matches, the opposition sometimes confused the two clubs, plus we thought it may also be confusing to any potential new members, who may not have realised that we were firmly based in Coventry.
However, our club membership continued to grow and today we are now 3 figures. Around the start of the new year 2023, we applied for grants from the National Lottery Community Fund and Coventry City Council. Russ and particularly Shaun Donnelly worked hard to put together a compelling package based around the premise that “Age is no barrier to health and well-being”.
We were delighted when both grant applications were accepted, a generous award from the National Lottery and one from Coventry City Council, but both greatly appreciated and warmly received.
We formed a new Committee and as these grants contained funds for Club advertising and promotion, we made the decision to change our name to finally reflect that we are based in Coventry. As most of our members lived in Coventry and the surrounding areas, it was a no-brainer to call ourselves COVENTRY & DISTRICT WALKING FOOTBALL CLUB.
This also tied in with the grant from Coventry City Council who awarded the grant to be used for the benefit of the community in the local Coventry area.
Being based at The Alan Higgs Centre in Allard Way in central Coventry offers the ‘pulling power’ of a large city population giving us a potentially greater opportunity to increase our membership, which is actually proving to be the case and our numbers are growing at an encouraging rate.
Our members are already benefiting from the new funding and we have many more new initiatives that will come to fruition in the year ahead. We challenged our members to design a new club badge and had a Club Badge Competition and asked the members to involve their families to design a new Club badge to go on our team kit and promotional material. That was very successful and we are now proudly displaying our badge on team and clubwear.
We have worked hard to produce this new Club website hosted by Pitchero and it has proved successful in attracting new members to the club.
We are a club that provide what we call “social” sessions of walking football 4 times per week, with 2 morning sessions for men over 50 and women over 35 on Mondays and Thursdays, and a Friday evening session for men only over 50 and a Tuesday evening session for women only over 35. The women section was launched on 28th August 2024 and we are proud to say that we are the first club in the Coventry area to establish a walking football group for women. Our club members have an age range up to 79 years old, however, for the more competitive players, we have entered men teams at age groups 50s, 63s and 67s in the Birmingham Walking Football League (BCWF). We would hope to field a Women's team in the future too.
If you would like to join us, we are actively looking for new members of mixed abilities who wish to play the walking version of the beautiful game, have some fun, keep healthy, meet new friends and enjoy the camaraderie of being with like minded individuals. Come along and give it a go, you’ll be pleased you did and you will be made most welcome.

Alwyn Day
Club Secretary
Coventry & District Walking Football Club