Running the Academy at Tonbridge Angels is always likely to throw an unforeseen happening at you. Often we help the boys with various parts of their development, not just football. We have been lucky this year to have an academy cohort of good characters and no difficulties at all, they have been fantastic to work with.

Being a father of three you are always worried that some of your charges may run in to trouble, you just hope that luck and a sensible attitude will get them through.

Imagine when that goes horribly wrong. When one of the Academy boys parents brought a story to spread which may help guard against a risk young people are exposed to, we were only to keen to help hand on the message.

Daniel Spargo-Mabbs was a bright, articulate and popular 16 year-old from South London with a great sense of humour and a huge zest for life. He died on 20 January 2014, having taken MDMA (ecstasy) at an illegal rave a couple of days earlier. This wasn’t the kind of thing Dan usually did. The Daniel Spargo-Mabbs Foundation has been set up by Dan’s parents, Tim and Fiona, in order to try to prevent such a tragedy happening to any other family. A drugs education charity, all our work has Dan’s story at its heart. Everything is offered free of charge.

A play has been commissioned about Dan to be written by award winning playwright Mark Wheeller, whose work is widely taught and studied in schools and appears on GCSE drama syllabuses. This is a verbatim play, whose title is Dan’s last words before he left home, ‘I Love You Mum, I Promise I Won’t Die’ It was premiered at the BRIT School in South London on 29 March, and received stunning reviews. We hope that this will go on to be taught in drama lessons in schools across the UK, and be performed to young people in a range of settings and organisations, with its important message of risk, choice and consequence.

If you would like to contribute to the work of DSM Foundation please see https://mydonate.bt.com/charities/thedanielspargo-mabbsfoundation Or contact admin@dsmfoundation.org.ukadmin@dsmfoundation.org.uk
Or see website http://www.dsmfoundation.org.ukwww.dsmfoundation.org.uk, Facebook danielspargomabbsfoundation or Twitter @foundationdsm