Monday- Stew surprised me on Monday and asked if felt comfortable to be the lead coach for the day and I was absolutely buzzing with this. I chose to coach the youngest group as I’m used to coaching under 16’s so I wanted to be outside of my comfort zone. I had an assistant who was also on placement from city college, so we were in similar positions. In the morning I allowed the assistant to deliver the warm up for 10-15 minutes, after this I took the reign and delivered the children’s favourite game. The game is called numbers and the children split into two teams and stand in opposite corners. It was 7 in each corner so the teams numbered themselves 1-7 and I would throw a ball into the middle and shout a number and they would play in a 1v1 situation to try and score. I then made many adaptions such as calling out more than one number, restricting touches and adding goalkeepers to keep things fresh and keep them thinking. The afternoon was again a tournament-based afternoon which was broken up with penalty shootouts and crossbar challenges to give them a break from games and give them something enjoyable to play in. This was my first day leading the sessions and I really enjoyed it and when stew spoke to me after he said I did really well, and I should be proud of myself which filled me with confidence.

Tuesday- This was my last full day of placement and I was quite gutted to be not carrying on as I really enjoyed this whole experience. Similar to yesterday I was leading the group again today, but I was in charge of a different age group. I was working with the 7-8-year olds and I knew from experience they were very talented footballers which I was looking forward too. I planned a session which aimed to really push these players to their maximum. The morning session was all about 1v1 shooting and defending which was interesting as I knew they were all good attackers, but it was interesting to see how they defended in a 1v1 situation. This allowed me to go through how to defend 1v1 and how to show the player onto the weaker foot and push them away from goal which I feel benefitted them lots. In the afternoon during the matches I was putting restrictions on teams to make things interesting and we looked into how formations can be effective. For example, I set a 10-minute game but one of the teams started 2-0 down. The reason I did this was to see if the team would play much more attacking and see how they adapt in these game realistic situations. Another situation I made was that one of the teams had gotten a red card and the game was 1-0 to them but they had to play 10 minutes with one less player and see how they may change their shape or the mentality. I really enjoyed this day as it was the type of coaching, I want to do more of. I love coaching technical aspects of football and teach them tactics to help them when they become more and more competitive.

Wednesday- Wednesday was a very different day as I was only in for 4 hours due to it being my last few hours to reach my 100-hour mark. I wasn’t actually set to a group which I felt was strange but it’s because stew wanted to have a chat with me. We spent the morning watching other groups while in discussion about my future plans. He offered me to work on an immediate start as a community coach but due to university and a part time job it didn’t really suit me. However, he told me to contact him after I finish my degree and he would be more than willing to offer some sort of position at the trust. To say I was buzzing is an understatement.