COACH
VIEW
How did you aim to
overcome the issue of
finding players?
Earlier in the year YFS
Radio caught up with
coach and chairman
of Gartcairn Football
Academy Robert
McCallum. Robert
shares his experiences
of running the
academy which was
set up in 2007.
What is your involvement
with youth football in
Scotland?
I take a team called Gartcairn
Football Academy who play in the
Central region. I suppose I was
made Chairman by default as I was
the first real member as such, after
establishing the academy in 2007.
What has been the biggest
stumbling block with
regards to the academy?
We’ve been quite lucky to be honest
with how things have progressed.
Any time that a team is added to the
academy there seems to always be
at least one person who volunteers
as coach of the team. The major
problem we had initially was a lack
of young players. We started with
just eight kids from differing age
groups. Obviously this was hard to
incorporate into any sort of game
situation. Its amazing to think that
in the space of five years we’ve gone
from that situation to now having
over 350 players.
The main thing we tried to do was to
target schools in the local area. We’d
put ourselves out there and gauge the
interest from school to school. Other
than that, it was mostly through word
of mouth that kids started to join.
They’d maybe hear that their friends
had joined and thought ‘I’ll give that a
go.’
How do you set about
finding sponsorship?
For some of our age groups it was
more difficult than others to begin
with. Having the finances at Gartcairn
centralised though meant that the
funds from each sponsor are spread
equally across the age groups. There
would be no point in competing
sponsors for one age group while
another struggled to get funding.
How does this
sponsorship come about?
It mostly came about through players’ parents or coaches’ work. This is
how we gained our sponsorship deals
with Co-op and also with John Lewis.
There’s always an in-road.
In terms of playing and
training facilities, how do
you approach this?
We have our own facilities at
Gartcairn in the form of two grass
pitches. Unfortunately these are not
suitable for eleven-a-side games. We
can however use them for sevens
games and fun fours areas. The Airdrie
area doesn’t have an abundance of 3G
surfaces and this is an issue for a lot
of teams who value playing on such
a surface. A lot of people go to the
council asking to have a pitch that they
can call their own. It’s all very well
having such a thing but a lot of people
don’t realise the maintenance costs of
football pitches.
Adapted from YFS Radio interview
by Robert Wilson
Issue # 1 | YFS Magazine | 9