When Cherubs Angels CEOs Michelle Waddon and Vikki Healan first walked into what is now the Cardiff Netball Arena, it wasn’t a sports hub.

It was a second-hand clothes shop, crammed with rails, graffiti on the walls, and a floor that was certainly not suitable for netball.

You’d have struggled to imagine a thriving netball community here. But Michelle and Vikki did more than imagine it. They built it.

Cherubs Angels Netball started nowhere near the corner of Splott that it now calls home. Just under a decade ago, it was just the two sisters, a borrowed space and a handful of kids in a dance studio.

“We literally started 2017 in a dance studio with about three kids, two of them being Vikki’s,” Michelle remembers.

“It was a tiny little area. We set it up because at that time there was nothing around for that age group.”

Those ages were two and four. Netball, in most people’s minds, starts much later. Michelle and Vikki decided it didn’t have to.

Word spread quickly. Three kids became ten, then fifteen. Soon they outgrew the studio and moved to a school in Pontprennau, and as the children grew, so did the club.

“We started the club from age two to eight years,” Vikki says.

“Then we had girls that were with us and they didn’t want to leave. We thought, well, we’re not going to send them to a different club, so we just increased the age

“We ended up increasing the age, increasing the age.”

Age groups were split out, classes multiplied, and for a while the school could cope. Then the pandemic hit.

With indoor sport shut down, Cherubs went outside to survive. On Sundays, the sisters hired all the tennis courts in Roath, loaded a van with posts, balls and bibs, and dragged everything across the grass.

“It actually attracted a lot of people,” Michelle laughs.

“We were outside, you could only go outdoors, and we had all these kids running around in bright pink. People were walking past going, ‘What are you guys?’”

They ran camps, created their own sports festivals when school sports days were cancelled, and leaned into what would become central to the club’s identity: the idea of Cherubs as a community more than just a netball programme.

“We kind of set up the ethos then of being like a child’s family,” Vikki says.

“Not just netball, just embracing everything that the girls did.”

Post-Covid, the club moved into the dome at Cardiff and Vale College, which quickly became their main venue. By now they had merged with Heath Angels and built out an adult section. For the first time, there was a genuine pathway from toddlers to senior netball.

“Basically, we had juniors all the way up to adults,” Michelle says.

“We ended up doing every single hour of every single day, just coaching, because we had so many kids and so many adults to coach. But we managed to build our coaches’ team there.”

The coaching structure took on a more professional edge. Coaches were put through qualifications, the club developed an academy model, and suddenly this wasn’t just a recreational Sunday session anymore, young girls with talent and drive could thrive at Cherubs.

“We decided it needed to run properly, not just like a little local club,” Vikki explains.

“We trained our coaches, put them through all their courses. We looked at our programme for the girls and what that looked like and decided, you know, we had some really talented girls, so rather than just running recreational classes, we set up kind of like an academy structure.”

That academy now means multiple training sessions a week, strength and conditioning, nutrition workshops, and mental health and wellbeing support.

“We wanted the whole package for all the girls,” Vikki adds. “To make sure they have access to all the information they need.”

The results are already visible. They have juniors elevated into the A team, playing in the Premier Division of the Cardiff league alongside current and former internationals.

“They are playing really at the highest level in South Wales,” Michelle says. “Two of the girls have been playing for [LexisNexis] Dragons under-17s. One of them plays for Wales.

“The ambition of these girls; a lot of them want to make it, and some of them are training five hours a week to do that.”

But they are adamant Cherubs is not only for the elite.

“We don’t want to be just recognised as a club that only has elite athletes,” Vikki stresses.

“We want to make sure it’s inclusive. We’ve got girls that can come and play recreational, have fun with their mates, and we have that for every age group and every adult.

“Our recreational programme is bigger than our academy. We have every sort of progression and every pathway in Cherubs.”

The dream of their own venue had been there in the background for years. It became a necessity the night Storm Eunice flattened the dome at Cardiff International Sports Campus

“It was completely flat,” Vikki remembers. “Overnight we had no facility, with 300 girls.”

What followed was chaos: six or seven different venues scattered across Cardiff, sessions across multiple nights, coaches racing across the city and equipment spread in every direction.

“It was absolute carnage,” Vikki admits.

“We always dreamed of having our own venue, but that was the nail in the coffin. We couldn’t keep driving bags of balls from one end of Cardiff to the other.”

Enter the building that would become Cardiff Netball Arena.

“We signed a five-year lease on this venue we’ve got now, which was absolutely in dire straits,” Vikki says.

“The whole space was full of clothes, graffiti, it was horrendous. It hadn’t been used for a long time.”

They tore it apart and rebuilt it. New floor, the Angels Café put in, toilets refurbished, the entire space reshaped into a multi-court netball venue.

“Every sort of penny that was put into the club from 2017 we reinvested back into the club,” Vikki says.

“We reinvested the whole thing into renovating the building and taking on the lease and the legal fees ourselves to fund this adventure.”

They didn’t do it alone. Parents and families turned up with paintbrushes and tools. One dad, a boiler engineer by trade, effectively became their builder.

“We’ve had painting parties down here,” Michelle says, gesturing to the glossing blue and white walls.

“All the kids and adults painting the walls white, just getting it to a point where it looked presentable and was able to be used as a sports venue, and not dangerous.

“We’ve just basically scraped by with everyone helping.”

That sense of community runs through everything. From adult social teams who begin a season not knowing anybody and ending up on nights out together, to parents organising beach days off their own bat, it feels less like a standard club and more like a network.

“I absolutely love coming down here on a Sunday,” Michelle says.

“Everyone just talks and chats, and we’re like our own little community. We’ve got girls from seven different schools in one team. They would never have met each other if it wasn’t for netball.”

They talk with particular pride about opening the arena for a single boy from a special educational needs school who struggled with crowds, giving him sole use of the hall just to kick a football around.

“If that’s going to be beneficial to him, because he doesn’t want to be around people, then brilliant,” Michelle says.

“You go to a park, there are going to be other kids. Here it was a really controlled environment. When we think about stuff like that, I feel proud.”

Behind the scenes, both sisters still juggle full-time jobs – Michelle with Gwent Police, Vikki with Saffron – alongside running a club and a venue.

They laugh that they could “be solicitors by now” given how much paperwork and legal wrangling they’ve had to learn on the job. Project management, they say, is everything.

It also helps that they are sisters.

“I don’t think either of us could have done this on our own,” Michelle says. “We’re so much on the same page with most things. We’ve got a bit of weird sister vibes like that. We normally know what the other one is thinking.”

The next challenge is filling the arena in daylight hours. Evenings and weekends hum with junior and senior sessions, but during the school day, the building is often empty.

They have already started primary school festivals, bringing in mixed netball and football tournaments for local schools, and are exploring ideas like walking netball, men’s netball, toddler and baby groups.

“Ultimately we are still trying to run a business,” Michelle says. “All day, every day this place has no one in here.

“The summer holidays are really tough because people have a break from netball, so we have no funds coming in and the financial pressure is huge.”

There is also the perception battle. Some in the netball community still see Cardiff Netball Arena as simply Cherubs’ home court, rather than a neutral venue for everyone.

“People see it as Cherubs Angels and don’t want to train at Cherubs Angels’ venue,” Michelle admits.

“But Cardiff Netball Arena is the venue we hire out. It’s completely separate to Cherubs. That’s why we made a different name. We didn’t want people to think it was our club venue, and they were coming into our club.”

Primary school festivals and open invites have helped. Once people step inside, the tentativeness tends to fall away.

For all the stress, for all the late-night ideas pinging back and forth on text, the Healans still talk about the same thing that drove them from that first tiny dance studio: their love of sport and what it can do for children.

“We’ve both played netball since we were little,” Michelle says.

“We’ve always played together in every team. When Vikki had two daughters and I had my daughter, it just pushed us to want more for them.”

Cherubs Angels is that “more” – a place where a two-year-old in a pink bib has as much right to belong as a Wales under-17 international, where sisters with day jobs and a stubborn idea can turn a forgotten unit full of clothes into a thriving home for all.

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