Safa Eastern Cape hosting key seminar
Weekend coaching indaba aims to come up with blueprint for improving structures
SAFA Eastern Cape will host a coaching seminar at the weekend in an attempt to come up with a blueprint which the province can use to improve its development structures. The seminar will take place in East London on Saturday and Sunday and will look into a number of matters.
The main focus areas will be how the province can improve at national tournaments, and why Eastern Cape coaches are not picked to coach national teams.
According to Safa Eastern Cape provincial secretary Isaac Klaas, the last Eastern Cape coach to coach a national team was Bobby Williams.
“There is always this cry that it’s only Gauteng coaches who are appointed for national teams but never Eastern Cape coaches. Could it be that we are not skilled for the job?” Klaas asked.
“We have people who we think are highly qualified and can do the job but they are not selected. Those are the things that we want to check by hosting this seminar.
“The aim of the seminar is to look into problems that are affecting the coaches and find a way round [them], [and] to also see if the Eastern Cape is aligned with Safa’s 2022 vision,” he said. Three technical heads have been invited to the seminar from each of the eight regions in the Eastern Cape.
“As a province, we want to check where we are in terms of the development programme in coaching, in terms of skills and which people qualify for certain levels -- and also how many coaches we have.
“We also want to compare how many male and female coaches we have in the province. “We want to know what levels of coaching the females possess, so that we are able to fast-track and balance.
“We also want to check what the coaches’ specialities are.”
Safa Eastern Cape also wants to determine how many of its coaches qualify for youth structures, goalkeeping and other areas.
“We also want to check why we are not doing well in the national championships.
“What are our selection policies, and [practices regarding] the appointment of coaches, managers and the retention of players? “The programmes that we have are just generic. For example we say we are going to have a D licence coaching course but we don’t even know how many D licence coaches we have,” he said.
Klaas believes the workshop will give Safa Eastern Cape a clear vision of what needs to be worked on.