Reformed in 1989 to provide local men’s football to those living in or close to the village, Bacton United 89 is now over 35 years old and has grown to be a popular, family-focused club offering football to over 250 members across 12 teams and age groups.
Over the years Bacton United has built an identity on doing things a little differently. One of these is their unique red and green quartered playing shirts – the team colours of the original Bacton United who played their last match before folding in 1971. The colours are well known across local grass roots football making the club instantly recognisable wherever they play.
With the growth of the club, came the desire from the committee to have a shared identity that can be seen across all teams regardless of whether they played adults or youth football. At that time, bespoke kits such as red/green quarters were not easily available or too costly to consider for all teams but for the last few seasons Bacton have been successfully able to kit out their entire suite of teams in their chosen colours.
However, the logistics of achieving this has often come with some of the challenges experienced by many local, grassroots clubs which is why Bacton United turned to STC in the summer of 2025 to help solve these issues.
Summer at Bacton is a naturally busy time. Summer fundraisers, new player registrations and adding new age groups and coaches means that often youth teams are not fully in place until the end of Summer with the season only a few weeks away.
“There is often very little time between one season ending and another starting and one thing that can often not be sorted quickly is playing kit,” said Paul Evans; Vice Chair at the Club. “For new teams, we are trying to assemble players, coaches and sponsors and for some existing teams, players move in and out of the club and therefore it can take a while before we can actually be in a position to order or replace kit.”
Bacton’s previous supplier often carried significant lead times due to the bespoke nature of the kit and on occasions it might not be until November kit was arriving.
“We moved to STC for a few reasons. Mainly, they could help us with lead times. Even if we ordered late into the summer, we could have kit here in less than a month. That was something we were not able to achieve with other suppliers.
STC is based only a few miles from Bacton’s home ground, and this made it easier to collect samples and orders which helped speed up the process. They also offered an online club store which we had been talking about for a long time, and it was so easy to set up.
We spoke to the coaches and asked what items they wanted and supplied this to STC. Within a week the store was live, and our players or parents could start ordering from it. It’s a really nice addition to what the players, coaches and parents can buy and extends our club teamwear beyond that of just playing kit.”
One year on from supplying a couple of youth teams, Bacton United joined The Huddle as part of a five-year Kit Partnership. The first task was to design a brand-new home and away kit for the men’s teams which would then be replicated across youth teams too.
STC worked closely with Bacton to provide a range of options which included some new designs which went beyond the standard plain red and green quarters. They also helped to design new warm up T-shirts sublimated with the club’s “89” and referencing the three stars – recognition of their three County cup wins in 1999, 2010 and 2017.
“The entire process of dealing with STC has been easy and straightforward. Moving to a Kit Partnership was an easy decision. If we have had questions, they get answered and it’s been easy to connect our coaches to the STC team and let everything be handled by each team as they need it.
We needed our first kits here in time for our first pre-season friendly. STC was clear by when we needed to order and the kits arrived with lots of time to spare and with no issues at all. The players loved starting the season in a new kit for the first time in six seasons.”
