Our first session was with a primary school called Dulwich. We were taking the after school class with Daymon, with kids aged around 9-11 years old. We ended up having around 30 kids, of these ages, all unbelievably keen to play football, but not keen on drills.
While speaking to Daymon on the way to the session, he told us all we had to do was a quick warm up, then get them into games, as we didn't have long for the session. So that's exactly what we did. Our warm up was pretty basic. We just gave each kid a ball and told them to dribble it around in a tight space, using both feet, and avoiding each other. They seemed to enjoy that quite a lot to be fair. Then it was time for the games. We split the group into 4 teams of around 7 players per side, and had 2 "semi finals", one on each half of the pitch. When that was over, the 2 winners came onto my pitch, while the others battled out for 3rd place. Unfortunately, we ran out of time, so there wasn't a winner on my pitch, as the scores were tied 1-1. Oh well, maybe next time.
After the kids all got collected, we handed our badges in and headed to UWCSEA, where we were yesterday. On our schedule we're there Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursday's. After yesterday's session, we thought that we'd be there to basically shadow and assist the main coaches there. Dan helped Simon and I help a guy i believe was called Kyle, but that may be completely wrong. Anyway, after yesterday, it came as a bit of a surprise to hear that we'd be together, taking over one of the teams for a whole session on our own. A nice surprise, but an unexpected one. That meant we had until we got to the pitch, which was about an hour away, to plan our top-class session. We planned, chatted, planned, and thought. Finally, we had our master session sorted.
We arrived at UWCSEA and got all set up and ready, the kids then arrived. We didn't have many, around 11, all playing for the under 14's, which was absolutely fine. We started off with a passing session, where they had to keep the ball moving, and inside a relatively small square. Dan took that one, which got them nice and warmed up, plus included a bit of fitness with running involved. Then, they came over to me for a bit of skills corridor. As the kids were quite good players, I decided to make it a bit trickier, and included a defender quite early on, which challenged them a bit more. We then progressed it to a game called Gauntlet, which is basically a game where players have to try and get past a few defenders, one at a time, before taking a shot at goal. They seemed to enjoy this quite a lot, and didn't want to stop when we called it, which made us happy, as they obviously enjoyed it. After a quick waterbreak we got into a match, Dan on one team, me on the other. I didn't keep up with the score but it was a good game to play, but me and Dan were sweating buckets at the end of it due to the humidity. It was horrible.
After that was all wrapped up we headed home, grabbed some food, and went to the apartment.
We couldn't get in our room.
The way our apartment is set up, is that we have one key for the actual apartment, then one key for our room. We'd somehow misplaced the keys. We searched everywhere for them. No luck. Called Daymon. Simon helped too, no luck. After a few hours, Daymon came over, and we had to do it. We had to break the door down. Dan stepped up to the responsibility. He took a step back, moved forward and gave it a mighty boot. The door was open. It wasn't even damaged much. He somehow managed to kick the door in a way that took the lock out, but the door was still completely intact. I was impressed. You can check out the video of it on my Facebook.
Late start tomorrow, don't start until 6pm, so plenty of time to lie in. Happy days. Hopefully we can have less dramas from now on..
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