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Football / Football Development in T&T
« on: July 28, 2013, 07:43:53 PM »
I know there are alot of folks out there that struggle with the notion of foreign vs local coaches running our football, even myself, but I experienced something this weekend that I think has answered this question for me.
The youth club I coach at has a partnership with Chelsea and the club put on a weekend long clinic and brought in 2 senior members of the Chelsea setup, Andy Ottley (International Technical Support Officer) and Ian Woodroffe (International Development Manager). These gentlemen are a big part of not only Chelsea's global branding but also their youth development. They went into great detail about the history and philosophy of the club, its state of the art facilities, its culture and its drive to develop WORLD CLASS players. Of course because of confidentiality reasons I can't go into too much detail about all that was discussed but it truly opened up my eyes to see how much goes into nurturing young talent and the process of how that talent goes from the grassroots level to a world class level.
Needless to say, because of my passion to the T&T setup, I started to look at how we are setup up locally and to be honest, we are so far away from the global "norm" of development that I strongly believe that anyone local who has to be charged to retool or create our youth development will not have the know-how to get this accomplished. We just don't have the historical database to fall back on. It made me even more pleased that Tim-Kee and they made the choice to hire Beenie man to be our TD because of his experience with Ajax, arguably one of the best youth academies in the world, he would have the knowledge and experience to help create a similar environment for T&T.
The presentation was mind blowing and a real eye opener for me personally. One main thing they spoke about within their facilities was a mental help office as part of their development. These mental help professionals work with youths, new signings and first team players alike. The youths go through classes to help them understand the club philosophy and how it is to shape not only their personal but also their professional life, for new signings its there to ensure they are mentally capable to handle a new environment and new lifestyle (they even assign a personal "help" assigned to that player for the first 6 months) and for first team players to overcome any struggles they may have within their game. For example, they talked about Cech having serious issues with saving PK's. He ended up spending much time working on strengthening his mental aptitude and as a result, he has become one of the premier PK savers in the world.
These are the types of facilities that T&T needs to be able to fully compete on the world stage. I know the team has psychologists traveling with them, but these clubs have special labs and areas to conduct testing and recording of everyone's progress. Again, very eye opening. Even a simple thing as Jose, during his first spell as Manager, changed the U21's dressing room to look exactly like the first team dressing room. His reasoning for this was that he did't want the youth players being in shock and awe when they do get called up to the first team, it should seem as if the environment hasn't changed, from the training ground, training sessions to the locker rooms, all in sync to accomodate the athlete psyche.
Anyhow just wanted to share with you guys. I left the clinic thinking that hopefully beenie has the chance and the time to really put something in place that can truly grow the game for our youths and begin to foster true talent to feed into our senior national team. From what I saw and learned this weekend, the structure from top to bottom is no where in place in T&T and to get there, its going to take some time and resources but with beenie I'm hopeful things can get there!! With our natural talent pairing up with a true global development structure in place, T&T football can surpass the levels we achieved in 2006.
The youth club I coach at has a partnership with Chelsea and the club put on a weekend long clinic and brought in 2 senior members of the Chelsea setup, Andy Ottley (International Technical Support Officer) and Ian Woodroffe (International Development Manager). These gentlemen are a big part of not only Chelsea's global branding but also their youth development. They went into great detail about the history and philosophy of the club, its state of the art facilities, its culture and its drive to develop WORLD CLASS players. Of course because of confidentiality reasons I can't go into too much detail about all that was discussed but it truly opened up my eyes to see how much goes into nurturing young talent and the process of how that talent goes from the grassroots level to a world class level.
Needless to say, because of my passion to the T&T setup, I started to look at how we are setup up locally and to be honest, we are so far away from the global "norm" of development that I strongly believe that anyone local who has to be charged to retool or create our youth development will not have the know-how to get this accomplished. We just don't have the historical database to fall back on. It made me even more pleased that Tim-Kee and they made the choice to hire Beenie man to be our TD because of his experience with Ajax, arguably one of the best youth academies in the world, he would have the knowledge and experience to help create a similar environment for T&T.
The presentation was mind blowing and a real eye opener for me personally. One main thing they spoke about within their facilities was a mental help office as part of their development. These mental help professionals work with youths, new signings and first team players alike. The youths go through classes to help them understand the club philosophy and how it is to shape not only their personal but also their professional life, for new signings its there to ensure they are mentally capable to handle a new environment and new lifestyle (they even assign a personal "help" assigned to that player for the first 6 months) and for first team players to overcome any struggles they may have within their game. For example, they talked about Cech having serious issues with saving PK's. He ended up spending much time working on strengthening his mental aptitude and as a result, he has become one of the premier PK savers in the world.
These are the types of facilities that T&T needs to be able to fully compete on the world stage. I know the team has psychologists traveling with them, but these clubs have special labs and areas to conduct testing and recording of everyone's progress. Again, very eye opening. Even a simple thing as Jose, during his first spell as Manager, changed the U21's dressing room to look exactly like the first team dressing room. His reasoning for this was that he did't want the youth players being in shock and awe when they do get called up to the first team, it should seem as if the environment hasn't changed, from the training ground, training sessions to the locker rooms, all in sync to accomodate the athlete psyche.
Anyhow just wanted to share with you guys. I left the clinic thinking that hopefully beenie has the chance and the time to really put something in place that can truly grow the game for our youths and begin to foster true talent to feed into our senior national team. From what I saw and learned this weekend, the structure from top to bottom is no where in place in T&T and to get there, its going to take some time and resources but with beenie I'm hopeful things can get there!! With our natural talent pairing up with a true global development structure in place, T&T football can surpass the levels we achieved in 2006.