Day 55

Day 55.

We had a nice late start today. We were given permission to work from home organising the upcoming soccer school which jeff and I are solely responsible for!

We awoke at 9, had some breakfast and then cracked on with our tournament preparation. The soccer clinic will be available for 60 kids. We will have 6 coaches, 3 pitches and 4 hours! We have two 3G pitches to use and then a large 11 a side football pitch. The kids will circulate so they get to experience 6 arsenal coaches. Well 2 and then the other 4 in Arsenal gear.. still great coaches but ones that don't actually work for Arsenal! They will have a total of 6 drills to experience, 2 on each pitch, focusing on different aspects of football skills. Myself and one other coach will focus on attacking and shooting because I'm a clinical finisher, cough! Jeff and one other coach will focus on dribbling and then the last two coaches will focus on ball control. To finish we will have a tournament. 3 pitches with 4 teams on each. A premier league tournament, an African nations tournament and a World Cup tournament. Each pitch has a different tournament. Then eventually at the end we will say the winner of the African cup was Ghana, the winner of the premier league was Arsenal, for example! Just so that it's not boring by saying on "pitch 1 team C won" Etc etc. At the end of the day we will have 3 winning teams who will receive medals and a few prizes!

After we spent the morning sorting it out on paper, it was time to go the office to create an actual pack to show to the Italian club. (Where we are hosting our tournament).

We left the office at 4 to make our way down to Drommedaris! We visited some boys and girls to break up their day and then configured a Zumba DVD on the TV from Joe's USB. Communicare want to do a bit more for the girls in their complexes because there seems to be a lot of soccer etc for boys but not much for girls.

Afterwards, it was time to take a session for the drommedaris action soccer team which play on Saturdays. We did a control and move season with the 16 boys we had. This took over half an hour as their are so many progressions and competitive edges you can add. We then finished off the session with a headers tournament. It's a 2v2 drill and it incorporates attacking headers and even a bit of goalkeeping! You score points by heading it into the goal, however the other team can act as goalkeepers and save the ball etc. The matches are 2 minutes each. If you win, you go up a pitch, if you lose you go down a pitch. The bottom pitch was called Italian Club, fourth pitch was White Hart Lane, Third was Cape Town stadium , Second was Emirates and the "best pitch" to finish on was called the Camp Nou. The aim of the tournament was to try and gradually get to the top and be champions! The session went really well with the drommedaris complex and we look forward to seeing them Saturday!

We had our meeting with Coach Keith, Roberto and two other coaches to discuss our soccer clinic coming up which went swimmingly and then we made our way home!!

Decent day!

All the best

Luke