| Pacific Soccer Academy in England - Toby Bell's Blog |
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| on 11 Apr 2008 | |
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Sorry I havn't written in a few days, the weather over here is frigid and I have been overtaken with sickness. Everyday this week we've had snow or hail or freezing rain. The brutal weather is hard for the boys as they are use to training in ideal weather conditions back home but they are still showing very well. As you can imagine the level of play is very high over here in the premiership academies and they are learning alot from the staff and their fellow teammates. The boys over here are very well mannered young lads and they have accepted the boys with open arms and treat them with mutual respect. The U-12 Sunderland academy team that the boys are a part of right now played a game against a local U-12 select team on Wednesday. The match was a very lopsided win for Sunderland and the final tally was 8-0. All five of our boys played exstensive minutes in the match and 3 of the goals were scored by our players from the C.O.E. program. Some of the boys looked a little fatigued as I noticed the level of play had dropped a bit in the Thursday morning training session. In the states, the players do not train as much as these academy players do. These Sunderland players train almost everyday with occasional 2 a day sessions when they have no school. The local team we played on Wed. was a team comparable to most class 1 teams in the U.S. and they only train a few times a week. So these players that are part of the premeirship academies over here get first class trainers, they are very fit and it's easy to see why they have such good success developing high level professional players. Today after the first session the boys and the parents and everyone in our group got to eat lunch at the training complex alongside the first team who had also just got done training. The boys could hardly hold back their emotions with this opportunity of sharing a table for lunch with the best players in the world. What a thrill it was for all of us. On Friday we play a match with another local select team but this will be against a U-13 team so it will be a more physically challenging test for the boys. Alot of the boys who play on these local teams are players who have once already been a part of the Sunderland Academy or another academy at one time. But they don't stay very long if they are not at the highest level, with some only lasting maybe a couple of months. When we were here last year in April, the U-11 academy team had 16 players on it. Now this same squad which is now U-12 has only 2 returning players on it. So they have gone out and scouted hundreds of players and brought in 14 more to replace those players that have gotten released. The Sunderland Youth academy assistant manager, Elliott Dickman, told me that the player drop off rate will dwindle as they get older but they will always release a handful of players after each seasonal review session. I will send a post game report of our match on Friday with the U-13 local select team. On Saturday we will be off to watch another premiership match at the Sunderland Academy of Light Stadium where we host Reading. And then on Sunday some of us will get to watch Manchester United play against the Arsenal Gunners in what could be the biggest match of the English Premiership season. Until next time, Cheers from Durham England. Toby Bell Director of Coaching Pacific Soccer Academy U.S. Center of Excellence |
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