AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE Tanzania Football Federation (TFF) said they are in final stages to come up with a special development programme to be followed by all football academies as a step towards enhancing grassroot growth of the game in the country.
This was said by the federation’s Technical Director Oscar Mirambo, who insisted that the programme will highly help them to monitor well the progress of the academies to see if they are adhering to the guidelines set in the programme.
“At the moment, it becomes hard for us to assess various football academies because we do not have a reliable programme to be followed by all of them. But, slowly, everything will be fine,” he said.
He added: “Every coach in the academies has his or her training schedule depending on what he wants the players to grasp, hence if we go there, it is usually hard for us to do our assessment as to whether they are right or wrong since there is no common syllabus to be followed by all of them.”
Mirambo said currently, they are still in the process to register all available football academies as a way forward to get their exact number before creating the recommended programme to be adhered to by all the existing academies.
“It takes time to complete the registration process but things are moving on well. So far, we have observed that most of the academies do conduct their sessions depending on the players they have and in doing so, they all differ in terms of producing the desired quality demanded on the current market,” said he.
Asked what a good football academy should have to excel in its effort to drill competitive players, Mirambo replied that having qualified coaches is a must since they are the ones entrusted to impart the necessary skills to the youths.
“It is unfortunate that in some centres, there are just people who have passion to train the young players but have never had a coaching lesson as such, they end up disseminating wrong development skills to the young players basing on their age categories,” he uttered.
He continued: “Once we get the common development programme, all academies will be teaching the same thing, which will help the country to have one football philosophy to identify with.”
He then disclosed that the federation already planned that by the end of this month, the syllabus should be completed and ready to be shared to the existing football academies for implementation.
Everywhere around the globe, investing in youth football is the only guarantee towards having competitive players, who can easily shine at the international level.
Most pundits in the country do recommend massive attention to the academies where they say it is fundamental for the development of football in the country as such; the concerned authorities need to invest a lot in grassroot level for the sake of producing required talents.
However, the good thing is that TFF is not falling behind as far as ensuring that youth development is seriously observed bearing in mind that they have established many youth football competitions aimed at unearthing and grooming talents.
