It's still a chal­lenge for na­tion­al coach Shawn Coop­er ahead of the CON­CA­CAF Boys Un­der-17 Cham­pi­onship in Guatemala in Feb­ru­ary.

Af­ter nine ses­sions at dif­fer­ent venues, Coop­er is still look­ing for a nu­cle­us of play­ers to do some mean­ing­ful work. He is ex­pect­ing that by the end of the month, this should be start­ed.

This week­end he will trav­el to the sis­ter isle of To­ba­go for a scout­ing ses­sion to add to the 50 play­ers he has al­ready snapped up in Trinidad. He told Guardian Me­dia Sports on Thurs­day that by mid-this month (Oc­to­ber) sev­er­al play­ers from North Amer­i­ca will be here to train, while scouts in Eu­rope are still try­ing to sin­gle out play­ers with T&T parent­age, those who are in­ter­est­ed in play­ing and are of the right age, as well as those who are seek­ing to se­cure pass­ports to make it to lo­cal shores.

Coop­er held the po­si­tion as U-17 head coach in 2011 and 2013 and took the T&T team to the quar­ter-fi­nal stage of the CON­CA­CAF Cham­pi­onship, one vic­to­ry away from qual­i­fi­ca­tion for the FI­FA U-17 Men’s World Cup on both oc­ca­sions.

Thurs­day, how­ev­er, he was still try­ing to put to­geth­er a group of play­ers that he can try to go all the way with.

A num­ber of the stand­outs from the cur­rent Tiger Tanks-spon­sored Sec­ondary Schools Foot­ball League have been se­lect­ed, while there are those who Coop­er and his staff have reached out to, but they have not at­tend­ed any of the ses­sions as yet.

Coop­er said these play­ers will have an is­sue with him be­cause he in­tends to do some work with them to see if they are what he needs on his team.

"A num­ber of the play­ers are on the tal­ent­ed side, but they are al­so on the small side, and they need to be pre­pared phys­i­cal­ly. For in­stance, if they go on to the field with a play­er with sim­i­lar tal­ent but is big­ger and phys­i­cal­ly stronger than them, then what," Coop­er ex­plained.

Ac­cord­ing to the suc­cess­ful Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege coach, in spite of the tal­ent, he has around him in his train­ing squad, they still have a lot of work to do.

Since tak­ing up the job, Coop­er has al­so ex­pe­ri­enced chal­lenges with in­juries, the weath­er and a con­ta­gious flu that in­ter­rupt­ed their train­ing sched­ule.

"I can say that we're work­ing with lit­tle to no time, but the good thing is that the play­ers are ac­tive, which is a plus. So it is now to get them to a cer­tain lev­el of fit­ness and do some tac­ti­cal work with them," Coop­er said.