Sydney FC teamed up with Football New South Wales and ESFA in February to aid secondary school students in their quest for coaching certificates.
Oscar Gonzalez (FNSW Coach Education Manager), Jaime Gomez (ESFA Technical Director) and Sydney FC ran the Grassroots Coaching Certificate for a new intake of secondary school students at the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence (NCIE) in Redfern.
Football coaching is part of the syllabus for these students and the Grassroots Coaching Certificate is the first step of the Community Coaching Pathway where the students will also obtain their Skill Training Certificate over the coming weeks.
Course facilitator Oscar Gonzalez stated that “It’s great to see what can be achieved when people all have the same motivation of developing our next generation of coaches for grassroots and beyond”.
After obtaining these Community Coaching Certificates, the students will then apply this in a practical sense by coaching students at Turramurra PS and Hornsby North PS throughout Term 1 with the help of the Sydney FC Community Team.
“All students are enthusiastically looking forward to the skills coaching sessions to follow and they feel privleged to have the opportunity to work with and share in the knowledge and experiences of the club and associations”, added teacher Steven Paterson.
Sydney FC are working with each association on initiatives to drive qualified and engaged coaches for the development of future players at the grassroots level. The program is the first to kick off of these initiatives and the club looks forward to engaging with aspiring students, parents and players who are actively increasing their coaching skiils, and will be running programs at Sydney FC associations at the start of the winter football season in March, April and May.
