Jozi concludes Powerade Performance Academy coaches’ empowerment clinics
JOBURG – Powerade Performance Academy empowers grassroots coaches in a coaching clinic held at the Wanderers Country Club.
School sports coaches from all around Johannesburg gathered at the Wanderers Club for the Powerade Performance Academy to share their coaching experiences and also learn from some of the more established ones in their fields.
The City of Gold was the venue for the concluding event of this annual seminar which seeks to empower grassroots coaches as the foundation of the country’s sports development programme. This was after a successful run of coaching clinics for coaches in Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town earlier this year with various experts sharing all their valuable insights and knowledge on effective coaching with school coaches.
“Remember that you are the foundation of the future of these young and aspiring sport stars,” former Bafana Bafana goalie, Andre Arendse told the coaches. “Their eventual success and rise to stardom begins with you. If you don’t do a good job at that tender age, you will have messed up the child’s chances of being a star sportsman or woman.
“If the foundation of a house isn’t good enough, that house will not stand the test of time, it will not wither the storms and more importantly, the child will not live to realise his or her potential. So, this just shows how critical your role is in shaping their futures.”
Arendse was part of the 1996 African Cup of Nations winning squad and played for teams such as Santos, Mamelodi Sundowns and SuperSport United before moving abroad to Oxford United and Fulham, both in England. He is the current goalkeeper coach for Bafana and SuperSport United and is a co-analyst and football pundit for SuperSport.
“Since that historic win of 1996, South African football has taken a downward spiral. I think this is where we lost the plot. Instead of nurturing future talent to take over from us, we just took it for granted that everything will fall in place without a succession plan, hence our game has since collapsed.”
He added that the beauty of development coaching was that mistakes were welcome and part of the learning process. “You should not support failure but ask the youngsters if there was anything they could have done better in that situation. Tell them it’s not the end of the world and offer solutions to fix the mistakes. Development is about putting learning ahead of winning games.”
Also in attendance were high-performance coach John McGrath, former Proteas netball player and now Stellenbosch University netball coach Zanele Mdodana and Natalie du Toit, Paralympics and Commonwealth Games swimming gold medallist.
Related Article:
