Lessons for State Football Associations from Canada

by Harmit Singh Kamboe

How does a country like Canada, that has no professional football league and no history and tradition of football sits on a FIFA rank of less than a hundred while a country like India, with football predating FIFA manage to sit at a FIFA rank of 165. To get to the bottom of this mystery, I decided to go to a day long training session organised by the Ontario Soccer Association. The training session was meant for adults that wished to get a certification for coaching football to children.

Here are my key observations:

1. The Power of volunteers
All community coaches i.e. coaches that coach children outside of school are volunteers. They coach because they love the game, or wish to be a coach when their child is in an age specific team or wish to give back to the community. The people that wish to get the different certifications for coaching have to pay a small fee and that money goes towards the cost of running the Association and its activities.

2. Abundance of training material
The Ontario Soccer Association focuses on providing the community coaches that are average people like you and me with printed books and web site material on the different drills that are best suited for specific age groups. The training material is partly covered by the fees that children pay to be part of the coaching program.
At such community clubs the ideal ratio of a football to players is described as 1:1. Each child should be able to run, dribble and practice with the ball so that they get used how to the ball feels and this becomes second nature to them.

3. Focus on the basics
The local community clubs start taking in children from the ages of 6 onwards. The goal of having children start at such a young age is to ensure that the basics are drilled into the child without them even knowing it. Some of the basics were defined as:

A. Walk, run or dribble with the ball holding your head up
B. Play games where the objective is to spot and throw/pass the ball to the "open" team player
C. Ball control drills and games
D. Games incorporating accurate passing of the ball

4. Strong base of the pyramid
When a child has been enjoying these games (drills) from a young age they develop game intelligence and good playing habits without even realising that they have imbibed some key lessons of the game.
This is what allows for the building of a strong base of the pyramid. When the children reach 11 or 12, they form a good pool of players for the district associations to pick from. The district coaches then do not have to start coaching the players from scratch.

Lessons for India:

1. Make playing fun
In India, in most schools, playing is an unsupervised activity. And when it is supervised by the PE teachers it is not fun. The test for children having fun is quite straightforward. If the children are not smiling and laughing, they are not having fun. We have to change not only how we teach sports but how we teach everything to children, period. Some how, we are wedded to the concept that a stern teacher is the best teacher, no matter what the age of the student/child.

2. Using the PE teachers in school
It is unrealistic in India to expect the state associations to use volunteers as a means of spreading proper football coaching among the children. Volunteers in India have far more pressing issues than teaching football to children.
But India has an abundance of PE teachers in schools. Most of these unfortunately are not really taught or trained in how to coach young children properly. State football associations need to empower these PE teachers. Schools also have the added advantage of all the children being in one place and having open spaces to play in. Written training material needs to be developed in the local languages for these PE teachers so that they can always refer to their handbooks.
This is one area that the State football associations can work in conjunction with the Sports Authority of India, rather than the two not working at all or working against each other.

3. Have the basic equipment in abundance
The real investment needs to happen on footballs, cones, portable goals, first aid kits and so on. Indian children need to be able to develop the same kind of "feel" for the ball and an "eye" for the open man that overseas kids develop from a very young age.
This is critical not only to produce better footballers but to teach young children the benefits of playing in a team sport, leading a healthy lifestyle and the power of structured learning and self development from a young age.