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NEWS
SEPTEMBER: SUMMER RESIDENTIAL REVIEW
Within Football Development Schools summer schedule, we were pleased to welcome 19 players to our Summer Residential at Grendon Hall. The five day residential was designed to develop the players understanding in a whole host of different environments, and we were delighted to be able to enhance our education programme to a number of outdoor activities, namely canoeing and the Grendon ropes course, along with having two swimming sessions with the boys.
With a good mix of players from our Development Centres present at the residential it was interesting to see how the group would form and the way they would work together over the five days. To the surprise of the coaches present the boys adapted extremely well to a number old challenges, which would often cause players problems when being away from home.
Firstly the boys had a great attitude to the food provided for them. While Grendon’s food was its normal excellent standard, players often struggle to adjust to different foods to what they have at home, however as a group they were the best eaters the staff had witnessed. The second area where the boys excelled was in their ability to get to sleep quickly, often the excitement of being away causes players to be awake and excitable well into the evening, however the group of boys again surprised the coaches with their ability to rest.
With these two massive tests overcome by the vast majority of boys, there were many individual lessons the boys would learn over their time with the coaches, some of the lessons were about their roles on the pitch, but the boys also learnt about how to live off the pitch, and becoming confident in different situations. The belief of the staff of FDS is that for a boy to be good on the pitch they must be able to function off the pitch. So developing children who can take on responsibility along with having the ability to learn, is a well rehearsed skill that can be practiced off the pitch with a massive benefit to the boys on the pitch as they will be able to use the skills on the pitch also.
Having again had a positive experience with the players the coaches will look forward to working with the players again in September and look to see if the lessons the boys would have learnt at Grendon have been reinforced in coming back to their weekly training.
FDS are delighted to announce that we have already booked Grendon for next summers residential and hope we can have as positive an experience as we had this summer.
