?The pow­er to great foot­ball lies with youth foot­ball. Mak­ing the com­ment was Con­ca­caf pres­i­dent and T&T Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion (TTFF) spe­cial ad­vis­er Jack Warn­er at the open­ing of the sev­en-day Youth Coach­ing Work­shop on Wednes­day, at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence, in Ma­coya. The Work­shop, host­ed by the Eng­lish FA in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Con­ca­caf and the TTFF, tar­gets coach­es wish­ing to ex­tend their coach­ing knowl­edge as it re­lates to 5-11-year-old play­ers. It will run un­til Thurs­day. Richard Horner, a FA re­gion­al coach de­vel­op­ment man­ag­er and Robert Ud­berg, a team leader of the FA Skills Pro­gramme, will be con­duct­ing the course.

Warn­er ap­pealed to par­tic­i­pants to use the knowl­edge ac­quired over the next sev­en days to the ben­e­fit foot­ball in the re­gion: "The pow­er to great foot­ball lies in youth foot­ball. The gilts and the glam­our of be­ing as­so­ci­at­ed with the na­tion­al team may at­tract many coach­es, but many fail to re­alise that it is the youth coach­es who pos­sess the keys to un­lock the po­ten­tial of great play­ers. "Tal­ent plays a great part in mak­ing an ex­cel­lent play­er, but har­ness­ing a great play­er can on­ly oc­cur if the coach mar­ries tal­ent and tech­nique. The tech­nique of any great play­er is cre­at­ed dur­ing his young years in the sport."

FA man­ag­er and work­shop fa­cil­i­ta­tor, Horner, while ad­dress­ing the packed crowd, stat­ed:

"This work­shop is go­ing to be dif­fer­ent; we will break new ground over the next sev­en days. I want you to know it will be chal­leng­ing but the re­wards will be worth it."

The work­shop will not on­ly tack­le train­ing tech­niques on the field but they hope to tack­le a num­ber of is­sues which af­fect a play­er's per­for­mance off the field. It will cov­er is­sues such as man­ag­ing mis­takes, self-es­teem and plan­ning plays. The course will pro­vide prac­ti­cal ses­sions and ad­vice for coach­ing this age-group and will in­crease the can­di­date's knowl­edge of how to de­vel­op their coach­ing to in­cor­po­rate the FA 4 cor­ner mod­el.It will al­so cov­er tech­ni­cal de­vel­op­ment and, in the phys­i­cal cor­ner, of­fer fun­da­men­tal ideas for coachs to use as well as ac­tiv­i­ties for the de­vel­op­ment of foot­ball spe­cif­ic move­ments.