T&T men’s beach soc­cer coach Ramiro Amarelle has wast­ed lit­tle time in get­ting down to work with this coun­try’s play­ers hav­ing un­der­gone his manda­to­ry quar­an­tine at the Home of Foot­ball in Bal­main, Cou­va, re­cent­ly.

Last month, the for­mer Barcelona and Span­ish beach foot­ball star Amarelle was ap­point­ed head coach of the na­tion­al team and along with his as­sis­tant coach and an­a­lyst Jaime Paz and Maria Gor­do, an­oth­er as­sis­tant and men­tal coach.

The 43-year-old Amarelle was tasked with lead­ing at the Con­ca­caf Beach Soc­cer Cham­pi­onship which takes place in Ala­juela, Cos­ta Ri­ca from May 17-23 where T&T will come up against USA, host Cos­ta Ri­ca and Turks and Caicos Is­lands in Group C of the 12-team com­pe­ti­tion.

T&T opens their cam­paign ver­sus Cos­ta Ri­ca on May 17, be­fore fac­ing USA a day lat­er and Turks and Caicos in their fi­nal match on May 19.

Group A com­pris­es de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons Mex­i­co, Pana­ma, Guade­loupe, and Be­lize while Group B con­sist of El Sal­vador, Ba­hamas, Guatemala, and the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic.

Af­ter round-robin pool play, the top two fin­ish­ers in each group and the two best third-place teams will ad­vance to the knock­out stage at the Com­ple­jo De­porti­vo FEDE­FUT­BOL Plycem in Ala­juela, Cos­ta Ri­ca.

The two semi­fi­nal win­ners will earn a spot in the FI­FA Beach Soc­cer World Cup in Moscow Rus­sia from Au­gust 19-29.

T&T has reached the quar­ter­fi­nals of the Con­ca­caf event three times, in 2015, 2017 and 2019 and for this year Amarelle says he is tar­get­ing this coun­try to its best-ever fin­ish.

Speak­ing with TTFA me­dia, Amarelle who is al­so a FI­FA in­struc­tor and ad­vi­sor and holds a UE­FA Pro Li­cense coach­ing badge not­ed that the first thing he along with his staff has been work­ing on is get­ting to know the play­ers.

He said, “First thing we need to do is to adapt to the play­ers so that we can un­der­stand each oth­er and know each oth­er. We have to un­der­stand per­son­al is­sues and mod­el be­cause we have to re­mem­ber they are not pro­fes­sion­als and they have a job, most of them while oth­ers are al­so stu­dents.

“Then we need to lis­ten to them, their lives, there needs and their re­quire­ments and their nor­mal lives be­cause based on that we have to cre­ate our train­ing plan in­di­vid­u­al­ly and a col­lec­tive one.”

Ex­press­ing the im­por­tance of un­der­stand­ing each oth­er, Amarelle said: “We can­not go ahead with­out lis­ten­ing and meet­ing with them be­cause our main job is to help the play­ers to im­prove and in­crease their lev­el and for that, they are not pro­fes­sion­als and we need to lis­ten to them and try to pro­vide them with the right tools and right con­text to de­vel­op the qual­i­ty and ca­pa­bil­i­ties."

With re­gards to the fa­cil­i­ties for train­ing at Cou­va, Amarelle said the sand was amaz­ing and the fa­cil­i­ties are good. How­ev­er, he had one wish though, that he had more time with the play­ers.

“We can­not be close to all the play­ers be­cause all the play­ers are from dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try and it's nor­mal that they will need some time to ar­rive here (train­ing).

“This is the on­ly thing we have to un­der­stand and al­so added it to the per­son­al is­sues at the end of the day, we have to train on evenings adapt­ed to the play­ers' jobs. And al­so on the week­end, it is our worse part but we have to adapt to that oth­er­wise.

“We have every­thing and we have to try and pro­vide the play­ers with the best fa­cil­i­ties pos­si­ble and with the best hu­man re­sources and I am sure we will try and lis­ten to the re­quire­ments while al­so try­ing to help them to im­prove their needs they have to im­prove our re­sources to help and sup­port them and their process.

Look­ing at his im­me­di­ate goal, the Spaniard said, “Some of the play­ers I know from a few years ago, but not per­son­al­ly to work with and we will need to adapt to each oth­er, to bind to­geth­er our process as a team be­cause some of them who will join the team are new and younger and we need lots of in­for­ma­tion in gen­er­al.

"Af­ter re­gard­ing phys­i­cal re­quire­ments we will then try to show them the spe­cif­ic in­for­ma­tion and the in­ten­si­ty and re­cov­ery time they need to ap­ply dur­ing their dai­ly rou­tine and week­ly rou­tine to be more adapt­ed or as best as pos­si­ble to the re­quire­ments of of­fi­cial com­pe­ti­tions of high lev­el.

“We want to achieve our best per­for­mance. This is our goal,” said Amarelle.

The rest of the T&T beach soc­cer team’s tech­ni­cal staff com­pris­es Ryan Au­gus­tine (play­er/as­sis­tant coach), Dr Ja­son Pil­grim (ath­let­ic train­er), Dr Oba Gul­ston (man­ag­er) and Yuri Chap­man (as­sis­tant man­ag­er/kit­man).