Football Canada is one of the many organizations forced to cancel most of its regular spring and summer programs due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
However, the unique situation has also allowed them to think outside the box when it comes to providing football to its athletes and coaches.
“There were a lot of participants that we expecting to have a football season this spring, and we wanted to still make sure we could still provide some sort of programming across the country because people want to be in football,” said Aaron Geisler, Football Canada’s director of sport.
In partnership with Athlete Era, a software company based out of Saskatoon, Football Canada has developed the “Football From Home” initiative, which provides athletes with age-specific drills they can do from anywhere, at any time.
The hope is that practising football at home will evolve from just running around and playing catch to specific drills catered to an athlete’s skill level.
“We can take this model in the future and really emphasize that whole learning at home bit so we can really enhance what we can deliver in practice and games because we know that these requisite skills have been worked on at home,” said Brian Guebert, Saskatoon Minor Football’s executive director.
“It’s really exciting where we can go with a tool like this.”
The app is also aimed at developing new coaches while providing existing coaches with more drills and knowledge to add to their toolbox.
“Getting new coaches into the game, especially football, can sometimes be daunting for people,” said Geisler. “We want to try and remove the barriers for people as much as we can to get into the game.”
And Guebert, who’s a coach himself, has seen the positive impacts the coaching side of the app has already had. In fact, he says 90 per cent of coaches in Saskatoon Minor Football were using the app last season.
“It’s a far better way of doing it than carrying a binder out with you that you received at some clinic and paging through it,” he said. “It’s a far more efficient way of delivering a quality practice.”
In fact, while practice planning is evolving with a tool like this, how coaches are getting certified is also changing.
“The traditional way that we used to train and certify our coaches was to bring them to a clinic over the course of a weekend and shove football down their throat for 16 hours and then send them off and hope for the best,” said Guebert.
“This kind of adopts that idea of micro-learning where they can look at today’s practice plan and a few drills that they are doing.”
When teams are finally able to practice again, Geisler hopes everyone will have developed their football skill and their football IQ.
He also hopes this time at home will allow others who might not be involved in football already, the opportunity to learn the game and hit the field when things get back to normal.
“I’m hoping that there will be new kids that got to experience the sport at home and maybe had a football lying around that they didn’t even realize they had, and then all of a sudden now they want to come out and enjoy the sport,” he said.
Comments