Tosh Farrell Soccer Magazine June 2020 | Page 11

What was the feedback concerning players parents? The survey asked, would you prefer parents to give information or feedback or the coach. The players mostly said they while they wanted their parents involved they preferred the coaches feedback and this was due to the players seeing their coach as a mini Pep or Klopp so to speak and they wanted some ownership. So what was the next step. We thought given the fact that most of the coaches involved in grassroots had other full time jobs and were probably only thinking about what session they would be doing that night maybe an hour before the session was due, we thought how can we help make take the workload off them so to speak and provide a resource. Everyone realises the commitment and value these voluntary coaches provide and the game would struggle to function without them. So we came up with our street games resource. How did you present it to the grassroots coaches? I took it to Hearts and spoke with chairwoman Anne Budge who is very community minded and she was very supportive and got right behind the program. We then went to East Lothian and delivered a session free of charge and attracted 60 coaches. My colleague delivered another the next night and another 60 turned up for that. The feedback was superb. We followed that up with a session at the new Oriam facility to which 250 coaches attended, which was unbelievable.