Football has been my favorite sport since a very young age. It is something that I find great joy in. Through the years of me playing football, I have played on many different teams under different coaches. From these coaches, I have learned many different and important skills that I have been using since I was first taught them. When it was time to begin working on a CAS Project, I immediately wanted to do something related to football. As Covid restrictions eased, the opportunity to coach younger players was presented. I knew that this was the perfect activity for a CAS Project as it would be a fun and engaging way of me passing down what I have learned to the next generation of footballers. I have no background in coaching but I do have a lot of knowledge in the technicalities of football. This way as I coach the middle schoolers and primary kids, not only are they learning, but I am learning something as well.

As this was a long-term project, I first had to establish how many days of training there will be so that I would be able to prepare each individual training session. I had anticipated to have 5 training sessions total. They would take place on Monday’s right after school on the OSC field and last 1 hour. Going into the first training session, I knew the basic equipment that I would need, cones, pinnies, balls and two or more goals. Just prior to the start of training, I briefly discussed with the middle school football supervisors, Mr. Leblanc and Mr. Mac about how we should run the session. We agreed to have a warm-up at start, a few drills. and then scrimmage at the end. We decided to keep the drills and intensity at a low as these sessions were all about having fun.

For the first session, I led a 5 minute warm-up with many of the same warm-up components that I do before my football practices. High knees, butt kicks, opening and closing the gate, etc. Next I got the kids into groups so that they can play “monkey in the middle” as a fun technical drill. After spending 15 minutes on that drill, I spilt the kids into 4 teams so that they would be able to scrimmage against each other in a round-robin format. Overall, the first day was a success as it gave me an opportunity to see how the kids are and how I should move forward.

Just before the second training session, we got news that there will be some games organized for both the middle school and primary football teams against other schools. This meant that training must be taken more seriously and geared to more game-like situations in order to prepare for these games. This meant creating starting line-ups and practicing how to work in a formation. For the next few training sessions we worked on some technical aspects like passing, footwork, etc. These were able to lay the foundation to begin working on playing as a full team. We had 9v9 and 11v11  scrimmages depending on the age of the team. Here I was able to coach the players on how to work together in a set formation. For the primary team which played 9v9, I decided to use the following formation, 3-2-3 and for the middle school team we went with a 4-3-3 for the 11v11 games.

The middle school team played in TISSIL which is a tournament for international schools in Sri Lanka. They ended up winning the tournament for their age group which is a great accomplishment. The primary team played a few games against other international teams and they ended up winning a few of the games. Both teams put in a lot of work in order to gain their accomplishments and this began from the beginning. I ended up having 7 total training sessions which surpassed my initial goal. With each training session, the players improved and so did my own coaching. I was able to interact with the kids better, I developed more sophisticated drills and I was really able to experience what coaching was like.

Here are some photos taken from one of the training sessions:

 

This CAS project required a lot of planning and preparation (LO3) as I had to plan each drill for each training session. I needed to know what equipment I needed, how many players work together, how long, etc. I did face a few challenges at the start as I was unsure of what drills the players should be working on. However I was able to do research and learn new and more effective drills to combat this issue (LO2). This was a long-term project which meant I had to show a lot of perseverance (LO4). I showed up to every training session that I could and made sure that I was on time so that I had time to set everything up. This project was very collaborative as I had to work with all of the players (LO5). But I also had to coordinate with the supervisors as they also had their own drills in mind. Overall, this CAS project required that I achieved multiple learning outcomes and in doing so I learned skills that I can continue to use on the football pitch, but also off the football pitch.