Soccer Saturday Reborn
April 20th, 2016
Hollandia is really excited about some changes we have been working on for the past year or so with community association coordinators in the North (Lawson Heights, River Heights, North Park, Richmond Heights, and City Park) to ensure a better experience for coaches and players in our area. This program is also available to teams in the Silverspring Community also.
Soccer Saturday is generously funded by Saskatoon Youth Soccer Inc. and in conjunction with the Community Associations, and the ASTRA Soccer Academy, Hollandia is happy to announce a major update to the way we will be delivering the program this season aimed at involving community coaches as well as the players.
A common problem with coaching soccer is that usually you are given a bag of equipment, some basic training, a few website links for drills and then left to your own devices. For most volunteers, this is just not enough, and we know it. It doesn't help us learn from each other, and for some people it leads to a really challenging season.
Each season we have tried different things to better connect experienced coaches with new coaches, get some access to master coaches, and to support all community players to have the best learning and enjoyable experience possible. This season, we have been able to work with the other community associations (and our coaching partner Astra) to arrange for head coaches and assistant head coaches to help us with out practice sessions and provide practical coach training. This means these coaches will be designing the practices, and groups of teams from the Community Associations will practice at the same time, in the same place to implement the practice plan together.
For this season, the kids will mostly be practicing in their teams, or in groups of two teams, but will share the field with 6 or 7 other teams. As you can imagine, this has required a large amount of scheduling and negotiations amongst a large number of people. We have just recently finalized these plans. Practices have been arranged to take place on Saturdays at the Umea Vast Field (the soccer fields behind the Lawson Heights Mall). Practice dates are: April 30, May 7, 14, 28, June 4, 18, 25.
To help us organize these sessions, and to give our coaches some options we have created a sign-up sheet at the following site:https://www.volunteersignup.org/BAAR8. U6, U7 and U8 have some options as to when on Saturday they would prefer to practice. U10s will all practice at the same time. Can I ask that any interested coaches sign up for the practice time you would prefer as soon as possible? For those teams with co-coaches, I encourage you to check with each other and pick the time that works best for both of you.
For coaches - the requirements will be for you to bring the equipment to the practice, and to implement the practice plan with your team per the guidance of the head coach. Coaches will be required to run the practice session before games and to coach the team during games. There will be a 15 minute turn-over time between practice sessions on Saturdays so if you have questions about things that arose during your game, you can ask another experienced coach, the assistant head coaches, or the head coach. Of course, we are also hoping this will make it easier for other parents to step in and cover off practices in the event you can't make a practice.
We recognize that this set-up is not perfect yet, but we are hopeful it will provide an improved experience for our coaches, and for our kids. If any of you (and your teams) would like to schedule additional practices just for your team, you are of course free to do so, but there is no requirement to do so.
If you have any questions, please message me here, or contact mini.soccer@hollandiasoccer.com
