During this week’s Young Leaders Training Program, we’ll be featuring some of the young leaders and coaches driving the program and their diary from the day of activities. Today, we meet Manchester’s very own Paul.
Paul joined City in the Community (CITC) in Manchester as the BTEC Lead Coach in August 2017. Previous to this, the he had worked for other professional clubs in the UK such as Bury FC, Oldham Athletic and Manchester United.
Paul spent 5 years in the USA coaching National Level Girls teams, and achieved success at Regional and National Championship Level in 2014. In his current role, the Manchester-native manages and oversees the BTEC College Program at CITC, which involves coaching 90 students on a weekly basis for training and games, as well as managing incoming recruitment to the College.
Alongside this, Paul is also the coach for Manchester City Girls Academy U14s. Paul has a BSc Hons degree in Sport, Fitness and Coaching, and is currently completing his UEFA A Licence.
Day one: Young Leaders Training Program
Today was our first day of the Young Leaders Program here in Melbourne. Everything went really well and all of the young leaders were thoroughly engaged and enjoyed the activities.
We started off the morning with 2 coaching sessions, showing the participants how to work with large groups in small areas to start with, giving them different ideas and drills.
Then we showed them how to set up an area for a session safely, and have different parts of the session marked out for certain things such as equipment, or a skill zone for early arriving players.
Just before lunch, our young leaders had the chance to network with 6 Melbourne City staff from various areas of the club and ask them questions about their roles and how they got into football. We had a theory and practical session on ‘Beautiful Football’ where the young leaders decided as a group how beautiful football should look and how they could set challenges and roles within their practical sessions to achieve this.
We were also lucky enough to have a Q&A session with 3 Melbourne City W-League players including Aivi Luik, Ashley Hatch and World Cup Winner Yukari Kinga.
We finished the day with a theory session on Team Skills and then set our weekly task as a group to achieve their Young Leaders award on Friday.
