About Us
Football buddies is a football development group, designed to teach boys and girls about the beautiful game. Our aim is to help children enjoy the game and gain more knowledge in life skills. We want to embed some of the requirements of a footballer into our tailored football sessions and help children recognise some of the skills a footballer needs to make it at the level required.
For the younger children, Football Buddies will be using many games for our children like ‘Snake in the grass’, ‘Postman Pat’, ‘World cup Soccer drill’ etc. These games are designed to help them with:-
- hand eye co-ordination
- movement
- listening
- team work
- running
- dribbling
- shooting
- passing…etc,
Football can be one of the most useful tools in a child's development as it supports the academic progression in school. With much needed life skills, such as responsibility and ownership, confidence and self belief; which can help both the naturally quiet or the withdrawn child with low self esteem.
Social skills and teamwork will encourage a child in class to share with their future peers and learn to be a team player.
Football Buddies feels that with the support of the community and other supporting groups such as Hackney Council, Local bodies, and Religious Groups, we can deliver the same delivery of coaching and football development to the whole community, this is part of our vision.
Football Buddies were able to complete a successful full Term Scheme during May 2010, at Millfields Park with the support of the Millfields Park TRA who provided a donation towards equipment, balls, bibs and cones. This was organised through Christine Hodge and delivered by Football Buddies providing the coaching. This validated our concept proving that the idea could be achievable with the right planning and structure, concentrating on quality of delivery for the children to enjoy the scheme rather than quantity of numbers.
After doing more research on local parks, and what other user groups were functioning within the Borough it was decided to approach a park that was less used by the local children, fortunately we came up with Springfield Park which is where Wayne started football coaching many years ago. We decided to deliver a six week holiday programme in the Summer of 2010. To date we have had over 50 users and 35 regular children including 10 girls. We have also recruited five volunteer coaches, a volunteer committee and been given full support from Academy of Sport East London whom have provided Football goals and further equipment.
Since we completed the summer programme, we decided to market the idea and continue advertising. We have actively approached 10 schools out of the 13 surrounding schools where we operate, Southwold, Tyssen, Jubilee, Northwold, Harrington Hill , Grazebrook, St Mary’s, Rushmore, Mandeville, and Millfields.
We have approached local businesses for support and also had a local Estate nearby allow us to use their Tenants and Residents hall as a meeting point and main location for meetings, presentations and as emergency premises when bad weather affects outdoor play.
