AfricaPress-Tanzania: LACK of confidence has been described as one of the contributing factors leading to decimal number of female football coaches in the country.
This was said recently by the national women’s football team ‘Twiga Stars’ Assistant Coach Edna Lema as she clarified on some of the things which she thought drags women behind when it comes to pursuing football coaching careers.
“In my opinion, I think lack of confidence and fear are some of the contributing factors preventing more women to venture in football coaching circles as most of them have the opinion that football is a male dominated sport.
“In most cases, when training programmes for coaches are announced, usually, the turnout of women is low in comparison with men.
They only think that when they complete their studies, they will be coaching men’s teams which are not true as we have many women teams out there which are coached by their male counterparts,” she said.
She added that Tanzania is among the few countries on the continent doing well in developing women football saying it can also be interesting to see more women embracing such opportunity.
“For us who are already there, we need to really work hard so as to attract others to come aboard to increase the number of women coaches and in such doing, create trust from people,” said she.
Edna has been working abreast with the national women football team Head Coach Bakari Shime and the duo have been doing well in their duties helping to put the country on the world face as far as women football is concerned.
On her part, former Twiga Stars coach Nasra Juma pointed out that training programmes for men and women coaches should be separated as a way forward to attract more women into the football industry.
“I think if there can be special training courses for women coaches, it will help a lot to increase the number of women coaches other than the current approach of mixing them up.
“Also, both the Tanzania Football Federation (TFF) and Zanzibar Football Federation (ZFF) should come up with good measures of ensuring that more women are drawn into the football world to work as coaches,” said she.
Moreover, Nasra observed that the country has more prolific former women football players who can be enticed to join the existing women coaching family so that they can dispatch their football skills to the upcoming generation.
