We started off by meeting Joe at the Learning Centre at 8:30, before he took us on to Greendale crèche. It was a small crèche, which, to be fair, it had a decent bit of grass to play on. Much better than the concrete (along with broken bottles) that we had to coach on at Ysterplaat 1. We sorted out our cones, and the first of the 3 classes came along. We decided that for the 3 Crèche's, we'd do the same thing with them. Starting off with the movement game, where they stopped when Martin held up a red cone, followed by passing the ball around in a circle.
The first group we had were nice bunch, bit quiet, but nice. Eventually, we got them running about, shouting Arsenal, which we were pleased about. The teachers that we were with were telling us how most of the kids didn't speak a word of English, and mainly spoken French, or Xhosa (pronounced Korsa), which none of the teachers spoke. Many if the children were sent there for about a year or so before starting an English speaking school too, so the work was really cut out for the teachers, as they had to try and teach them English in about a year. This also meant that quite a few of the kids didn't fully understand us though, but we got by.
The second group, however, were silent. Now, they made us work hard. We were determined that by the end of the session, they'd be shouting "Arsenal" at us, after pretty much whispering it at the start. Thankfully, due to the fact most of our energy was poured into making them more lively, we got there in the end, and they were shouting at the end of it. Brilliant. Job done.
The third group came along, and they were similar to the first group, a bit shy, but got noisy towards the end. This group were a bit more disruptive however, and although most of our energy was pumped into the first group, we still found enough to make sure these kids had a good time. By the end of the session they had been running, hopping, skipping, jumping, shouting and having fun. So in my opinion, it was job done. As the crèche was right next to the airport, we constantly had planes going over our session, which disrupted us a bit, but we got through it though. If Arsenal have thought us anything, they've taught us that we have to deal with any circumstances that are thrown at us, and I think we did pretty well today.
We then had a few hours off in the Learning Centre, where we had these amazing sandwiches which Lena made us, before heading off to our afternoon session, Mondale High School.
We didn't know this before we started coaching, but we were actually coaching 3 guys who were playing for the Ajax Cape Town academy. So the ability of these lads was pretty good. After speaking to the main coach, he was saying that he was certain a couple of them would go professional, which is impressive, plus a nice feeling knowing we were coaching some good, young players.
We did a bit more of an intense possession session, and we were a lot more heavily involved to help the players, which felt amazing for me as it was the sort of level I wanted to coach at. Fortunately, one of the reasons Martin and I work well together is because we want o go down seperate ways in the future. He wants to focus more on getting kids into sport, and getting them interested and having fun at a young age, and I'm more interested in training players at an elite level, on the more serious part of football, where the aim is to develop players. The brilliance of this is, that we can both help eachother on the particular bits we want to improve on. We challenge eachother, and give eachother advice, which is what ultimately helps improve coaches and sports leaders in the long term.
The kids at Mondale were exceptional. In my opinion the best group of kids we've coached by far. They were exceptionally well behaved, had a decent level of banter (they've seen Harry Potter, I'll let you imagine what they mentioned), and did everything we asked them to. It was brilliant. A real pleasure to coach. We're back there next week so I'm going to come up with a bit more of an in depth session for them. They want to focus on 1 on 1's and counter attacks so I'm going to try and tailor the session for that. But overall I really enjoyed it.
We ended the session at around 4, as Joe he to be back and be at the Learning Centre by 5 to open it up for a business meeting that someone was planning to hold there. We were free to go though, so headed home to prepare ourselves for the Arsenal game.
2-0. Not good enough. We made it far too difficult for ourselves after the first leg, and ended up going out at the supposedly "easiest draw". Awful.
Need to be up early tomorrow so will end the post here, looking forward to tomorrow, should be a good day. Read about it tomorrow night.
Harry
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