CLAY­TON CLARKE

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

Six­teen coach­es in To­ba­go are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion’s (TTFA) C Li­cence Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gramme which got un­der­way at the Dwight Yorke Sta­di­um in Ba­co­let, To­ba­go, last Thurs­day.

Tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor of the TTFA, An­ton Corneal, along with the TTFA’s head of coach­ing ed­u­ca­tion Ra­jesh Latchoo, and coach­ing ed­u­ca­tor Paul De­cle are con­duct­ing the train­ing. The du­ra­tion of the course is three months.

Corneal says dur­ing the ini­tial week-long work­shop, the par­tic­i­pants looked at the phas­es of plan­ning a train­ing ses­sion.

“We are through things like Ses­sion Plan­ning. We are go­ing through Lead­er­ship. We did a de­mo ses­sion in Ply­mouth where coach­es will not on­ly be to see and why it is done but asked ques­tions and then they them­selves will have to de­sign coach­ing ses­sions based on a spe­cif­ic top­ic.”

Corneal ex­plained that over the 90 days of train­ing, there will be the­o­ry and prac­ti­cal ses­sions.

“It’s a three-month course where it is di­vid­ed in­to blocks. This is the first block which is re­al­ly five days and then they go in­to a de­vel­op­ment pe­ri­od in groups of four where they will go back in­to their own en­vi­ron­ment and pret­ty much get to prac­tise what was done.”

He added that the C Li­cense Course is be­ing of­fered to To­ba­go coach­es for the sec­ond time for the year. The for­mer na­tion­al play­er and coach fur­ther said that suc­cess­ful coach­es can now vie for coach­ing stints at schools.

“Hope­ful­ly, this lev­el li­cense will be one that will af­ford them to coach in the (foot­ball) acad­e­mies, in the school’s pro­grammes, and Un­der-16 and U-14,” said Corneal.

He told Guardian Me­dia that the suc­cess­ful par­tic­i­pants can look for­ward to ad­vance them­selves fur­ther say­ing, “In the near fu­ture we will be do­ing a B Li­cence Course in To­ba­go over the next month or two.”

Corneal shared that the coach­ing dri­ve by the TTFA is an at­tempt by the lo­cal gov­ern­ing body for foot­ball to in­crease the num­ber of qual­i­fied coach­es in the coun­try.

“What we are hop­ing to do is that is get all our coach­es cer­ti­fied whether they coach at the high school lev­el, the club lev­el, the acad­e­mies or na­tion­al­ly.”

Ac­cord­ing to Corneal, A Li­cence Course is al­so cur­rent­ly tak­ing place.

He said, “Our pro­gramme is one that we are able to fa­cil­i­tate A Li­cence Course. We have three of them so far. The first one is fin­ish­ing in a few months. We have per­sons from all across the Caribbean tak­ing part in this A Li­cence Course. It is just part of our path­way where some­one is able to come in­to us from the C Prep, which is the D Li­cence, take part in our C and B Li­cence cours­es, and then move on to take part in our A Li­cence cours­es.”