By Ras Wadada

TECHNICAL Director (TD) of the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) Ian Greenwood yesterday explained to the Media the Federation’s plans to kick start a ‘Grassroots’ Festival, designed for five- to twelve-year-old boys and girls.The Festival is scheduled to start at the end of January next year, but Greenwood stated over the next four weeks trial Festivals will be held in the different member associations (MA) of the GFF.
“Over the next four weeks we are going to have one ‘Grassroots’ programme in each of the nine associations. Each Festival will be the start of a long-term ‘Grassroots’ plan which will kick off at the end of January next year, so the idea of the Festival this weekend is to really design a nice programme for a brand new number of kids between 5 and 12 years old.
“What really we want to do at the GFF is to get a brand new group of players into the football fraternity. The idea of the Festival is to try and bring out as many new boys and girls as possible.”
“What we hope to do as well is to get as many parents, aunties, uncles, relatives and friends to come on board, so the main idea of the Festival is to get as many new persons involved as possible”, the TD stated.
“The programme is really to promote ‘Grassroots’ football in Guyana because at the moment it is one of the key areas, as a Nation, we struggle with, in terms of the structure and the number of young boys and girls playing,” Greenwood declared.
The first Festival will be held at Golden Grove on the East Coast this Saturday between 10:00hrs and 14:00hrs and this will be the official times for all the Festivals to be staged in the various MAs.
“We will first have an introduction to the programme for all the kids together with the parents, relatives and friends. After that the kids will be given different activities throughout the day. We’ll be working on fundamental warm-ups, dribbling techniques, passing techniques, lots of fun football games, lots of 3v3, 4v4 and 5v5 activities. It’s going to be a real introduction to lots of new boys and girls in terms of football,” the Englishman told the Media.
A coaching staff from the GFF, headed by the TD, will assist the MAs in running the Festivals so that afterwards they can run the programme themselves. At the end of the day all the participants will be given a Certificate of Participation.
The actual programme will start next year February with coaching courses, after which there will be year-round structured coaching sessions for the youngsters.
The GFF plans to have a Technical Development Officer in each association who will be responsible for establishing academies for the different age groups. From those academies the best players will form the national squads for the different age group programmes all year round.
“One of the problems we have in the country is that we don’t have enough qualified coaches, referees or match commissioners, so those will be the big areas we will be looking to develop massive, come next year,” Greenwood advised.
The Englishman, who is just over a month in his four-year contract with the GFF, in his assessment of what he has seen so far revealed that “to improve the national team we need a much bigger base of players and at the moment the bottom of our triangle is very small so what we need to do is widen that base”.
“We have got fantastic individual skills in our U-11s, but we need to teach them the game a little bit more. In terms of where we are and how we play as a team we are probably a few years behind where we should be at the moment.
“Individually our skills level from a lot of the players is where it should be at this age, in terms of the U-11s, but theirs and the coaches’ understanding of the game is a key area we need to work on, but we have got fantastic potential here; we have just got to harness it a little better.
“We definitely got potential, we just need to help guide the structure better,” Greenwood said.