FINDING BRAZILIAN SOCCER SCHOOLS...
The one thing harder than finding football shirts in South Africa is finding good football training.
This is the tale of how we found the latter. This is what we wrote for the BSS KMFEzine.
The Cordeiro family’s journey to meeting Simon Clifford on
his visit to South Africa began about four years ago, with their boys wanting
to learn to play attractive possession football. So Dad, Christopher, began
researching soccer coaching and training systems.
When talking to parents who had kids at soccer clubs or whose
kids played soccer at school he found that a lot of the time was taken up by
fitness training of the "run around the perimeter of the field five times" type
and then playing a match.
They were told that kids didn’t like drills and would rather
play a match.
Both at schools and at clubs, the focus seemed to be more on
discovering talent than working out what made a talented footballer and
training children to be the best footballers they could be.
Neither of these routes seemed to justify the time and
effort involved. Also, most schools and clubs only played seasonally. It seemed
mad, if you wanted to develop as a player, to train for only a few months a year.
It would be like a musician who only practiced their scales for half a year and
then expected to be world-class.
They realized that they would have to follow a Do-it-yourself
route. Christopher explains, "We
began scouring bookshops, and bought every coaching manual we could. While the
manuals were better than what we were seeing in local schools and clubs, they
didn’t seem to have an integrated system of coaching, and they also neglected
the small skills, the building blocks that players need to know and practice
before they go on to the more complex drills."
"One evening while researching on the Internet, I came
across a reference to Simon Clifford and the revolution that he was leading in
soccer training and coaching. I downloaded
a lot of information from the Brazilian Soccer Schools website and gave it to
the boys to read."
Simon soon became one of the boy’s heroes. They had not only
found the kind of football that they wanted to play, but someone who was
training players of all ability levels, to play in a fast-paced and attractive
style.
Christopher continues "Unfortunately we couldn’t find anyone
who was doing Futebol de salão
in South Africa and so we realised that it was the D-I-Y route again."
"Thankfully we found that Simon had made two DVDs, and with
a bit of searching, we were able to find a supplier of a ball that we thought
was a Futebol de salão
ball. On meeting Simon we learnt to our dismay that these balls weren’t 100% Futebol
de salão
balls, but they served their purpose."
When the balls and DVDs arrived Gregory and Xavier set up
their own training programme and have been practicing with them every day for
the last two years.
They however lacked the dedicated coaching that they would
have liked to access, and they also wanted to find a group of players alongside
whom they could develop their skills.
Gregory takes the story further "A few weeks ago I was reading
the local sports section of the Saturday paper, and came across an article on
the launch of the Brazilian Soccer Schools in SA. I showed it to my Dad and
asked him to call when he had a chance."
"The article just mentioned the opening of the soccer school and so it didn't seem that there was any reason to call immediately."
"When my dad phoned a few days later he spoke to Nick Aresti,
who had brought Brazilian Soccer schools to SA. We were then given the big
news. Simon Clifford was in the
country, and we could meet him on Friday! Our whole family was very excited, as we had been fans of Simon
and his approach for years."
"We invited our close friend, Prince, to join us and meet
Simon, as he had heard about Futebol de salão and the Brazilian Soccer
Schools from us and was keen to know more."
"We couldn’t wait for the big day, and when we met Simon we were
impressed by his very kind and generous manner. He spent a long time speaking
to us, and very kindly signed the soccer balls and DVDs that had been the basis
of our training for nearly two years."
Within the week Gregory and Xavier signed up to join the Brazilian
Soccer Schools, and both boys are now happily training alongside the growing
group of South African soccer players learning to play the Brazilian Soccer
Schools way.
Gregory and Xavier want to say a big thank you to Simon and
to Nick for bringing BSS to South Africa.
