Netball club raises £54k in 75-hour 'marathon'

The team scored a total of 1,574 goals during the challenege

Players from a Leicestershire netball club have raised £54,000 for a children's charity by playing for 75 hours non-stop.

Ashby Netball Club launched its "marathon" match on Thursday morning and shot the last goal on Sunday afternoon.

Organisers said the money raised would go to the Lichfield-based Kids' Village charity, a holiday resort for children with critical illnesses.

The club also said it hoped the event, played at the Ivanhoe School, in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, had broken two world records and set an entirely new one.

Carla said her daughter Evelyn, four, had helped inspire the challenge

The club hopes the 1,574 goals scored by the team in 60 minutes will be confirmed as beating the current record of 1,100 set by Trinity Netball Club in Middlesbrough in 2021.

It also hopes Imogen Talbot's 49 goals in a minute will be verified by Guinness as a new world record, overtaking Suzanne Hobson's 40, set in Knaresborough in 2023.

Finally it hopes the 98 goals scored by the team in 60 seconds will be confirmed as a newly set record.

Organiser Carla said: "It takes some time for new records to be confirmed but we should have three.

"I'm really proud of everyone. At the end of the 75 hours we had people with blisters on their blisters.

"One person played for nine hours straight then came back the next day and played again.

"At the end we were all just running on the last of the adrenaline we had."

Kids‘ Village founder Sam Fletcher said the players had been inspirational

Carla, originally from Stoke-on-Trent, in Staffordshire, said she wanted to support Kids Village because her daughter Evelyn, four, has Hirschsprung disease and had two-thirds of her bowel removed when she was a baby.

"For five weeks after her birth, Evelyn was in neonatal intensive care and she had multiple surgeries.

"We saw first hand the strain that having a very ill child can put on families so we wanted to help a charity that supports them."

The charity's founder Sam Fletcher thanked the players.

"Carla and all the team are so inspiring," she said.

"I just can't believe what they've managed to achieve, the amount of money they've raised and the the effort they put in."