With an eye firmly on the discovery and development of future talents, the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) officially launched their Grass Roots Festival yesterday.
The event which is slated to commence on Saturday at the Golden Grove Community ground, East Coast of Demerara, will be headed by recently appointed Technical Director, Englishman, Ian Greenwood.
Speaking at the launch of the event held at the GFF Headquarters, the former Leeds United Junior-Coach said the initiative will last for four weeks and will be geared towards children in the age group of 5-12. The programme is slated to start at 10:00hrs and conclude at 14:00hrs.
According to Greenwood, “The idea is to really design a programme for a brand new set of kids, so the idea is to bring out as many kids as possible. In terms of what we will be doing with the kids it
is basically fundamental like key drills and dribbling skills. There will be different activities throughout the day”.
He revealed that the project is part of the larger plan of the federation to create various developmental and player identification platforms throughout the nine member associations, adding that many of the initiatives will not be commissioned immediately due to the lack of qualified personnel.
“We can’t have all the programmes up and running because of the lack of qualified personnel so coach’s education will be a massive programme for next year”, he added.
Greenwood further posited, “From the end of January there will be coaching programmes running for a long period of time and they will be structured on specific training like for five-year olds and eight-year olds. So it will be a full programme of coaching”.
He hinted that the federation is currently engaged in creating an Academy Programme for every association, which will be used to start the national talent identification process, declaring that the objective of the proposal is to have a national programme throughout the entire year and have the best players identified and available for international selection.
