I am passionate about football so I am excited to be able to teach younger kids how to play football as a service. This will test my leadership skills and my planning skills for when I am coaching.
There haven’t been any sessions in service where we can meet the people in person because of covid, and so far we have only been sending recordings of certain football drills to the school. This inconvenience hopefully gets resolved soon so it will be a lot easier to teach the students football. This will also make it easier for the children to learn football as well. We have also learned strategies in how to teach and have assigned each person to a warm-up drill, main drill, and cool-down drill. This will make it a lot easier for everyone in the service to be involved and also give them a chance for the children to learn from different people.
August Reflection:
I am not too sure how this service journey is going to look because of COVID restrictions blocking contact with us and the children that are willing to play football and learn football from us. I assume that we will have to send videos of us doing certain skills and drills for them to follow at their own school.
I have been playing football for most of my life and it is very interesting to see football in a different perspective. Looking at football in the perspective of a coach could change my perception of football training and make me appreciate certain stuff that coaches do that I wouldn’t really notice otherwise. I think that if the COVID issue gets solved, the service could be very helpful for me as a football player.
Final reflection:
I thought that this service overall was very fun and interesting. As a service group, we helped each other on the collaboration side and we all contributed by coming up with ideas. The attendance rate was very good so we could make the most of the time we have every week and come up with ideas and drills that we could coach. The most challenging part of the brainstorming part was realising that we were coaching children under the age of 6 so we couldn’t include very complex drills and every activity has to be very straightforward and easy to follow. These children also have no experience with football so it was also very difficult thinking of activities that would require very low football abilities but still be a football activity. We coached middle schoolers in our school to practice coaching the younger children. This was very fun and it brought football in a different perspective and a new light that I had not seen before despite playing football for around 10 years.
When it came to coaching the children, I found it very difficult. We tried considering all the possibilities but there were still some things that we had not considered about the children, for example, their attention span and that not everyone might be interested in playing football. Appealing to children was very difficult for me because it is not something that is very familiar to me and there aren’t any young children that I spend time with to learn this skill. There were also children crying and not listening which made it frustrating and tested our patience. We coached the children three times which wasn’t as much as we were hoping for but at least we still got to coach the children in person. Activities such as Simon says and duck duck goose was easy to start off the sessions because it was well-known and easy to follow. We then just let them dribble the ball around as much as they wanted with goals for them to shoot in. There were people from the service who can walk around and help them or play with them. At the end of the last session, we played a match with everyone and although some children were confused about what to do, most of them found it fun.