YOUNGSTERS celebrated winning a great new football strip with the Craven Herald, as their coach explained that their success was down to a community effort.

Grassington Juniors were the runaway victors in a competition in which local sports teams were invited to collect vouchers printed in the paper.

The Dales club's members achieved their goal with a whopping 1,900 vouchers.

The juniors team sponsors football sides at Threshfield and Grassington Primary Schools, and keen players from the Threshfield school were the first to try on the new kit when it was handed over to juniors coach Chris Gregson by Craven Herald editor Andrew Hitchon and Hayley Sagar from the paper's promotions department.

The schools teams will be wearing the new strip when they start competing shortly in the Individual Inns Primary Schools Football League.

Mr Gregson, who is landlord of the Fountaine Inn at Linton, said the new strip would make a real difference to the players. "You can see the lift they get from it from their faces when they get it," he said.

He said when they started collecting the vouchers they had put posters up in a local shop and in the pub.

"I was just amazed by the response from the whole community, right up the Dales.

"Farmers who had seen it in the paper came in the pub and said 'it's a great cause' and were dropping them in. Young people were interested in it and the elderly as well, the whole community.

"The whole thing just seemed to capture the imagination." He said the teams he coached catered for youngsters aged from seven to 11.

The competition to win a new kit, worth about £500, was open to all types of sports teams and ran throughout February of this year, with thousands of vouchers being collected.