By Jonathan Hannay | Project Leader
We have been working with sport for 12 years now and our focus has always been on inclusion and developing children and young people's social skills and health. As you will have read in our previous report as we have expanded to giving classes in local elementary schools we have been busy promoting friendly matches between groups of boys from different schools and the community courts we are working on. These are proving to be a big success with a very high level of parental engagement which is something that has always been a big challenge for us.
At the end of September, one of our new coaches, Matheus, came to tell us that several local teams were encouraging him to enter an under 14 and an under 16 team in the Diadema Municipal Futsal Championship and that they were willing to provide the funds to pay for refereeing and all the competition fees. After a discussion with the members of the team we decided that it was time for us to take this step considering the very large number of boys we are working with them and whilst our focus continues to be on social inclusion, we also feel that we need to provide an outlet for children with higher skill levels who want to compete and challenge themselves to develop more.
So far we have had mixed results with our under 16s unable to progress beyond the group stage however the under 14s have managed to get to the knockout phase where they will face the strongest team i the competition. We interviewed one of the boys, James (we have changed minors names to protect their privacy), who had this to say "I have been training at ACER for 7 years and this is the first time we have gone in to a championship.I was really pelased to be called up and proud that I can represent somewhere where I have grown up. Over the three matches, we have played well but we are also training to remove the errors we have made from our game. The group is very united and we are improving our relationships and getting closer to each other." And one of the youth monitors shared "I think that we as coaches need to work more on the behavioural side of the game and prepare the children for the matches."
Thank you for your continued support.
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