Launched last January, the girls’ Emerging Talent Centre was brought to Grimsby as part of the FA’s support and development of girls’ football in the country.
Grimsby Town Foundation were chosen to receive funding to help develop young talent in our area, aligning with the FA’s vision for developing girls’ football and working towards making sure talented girls in the game have access to specialist coaching within an hour’s travel.
We are delighted to be over a year into our program and feel we have made big strides in lots of different areas within our delivery.
We are especially pleased to see the progression within both our goalkeeping department and our Strength & Conditioning sessions and feel these have benefitted the players well.
We have delivered our ETC program alongside our Premier League Kicks program and this has seen lots of success stories, with 21 players across the course of a year having moved up to the ETC groups.
After the initial recruitment event last January, which we had over 100 participants attend, we had a 30-week training program, which included positive experiences playing against other ETC providers along with our training provision.
We then held our recruitment event before the start of the 2nd season in October, which again saw over 100 girls engaged, which was excellent to see how much the women’s and girls’ game in the area is continuing to grow.
We have also introduced our Futsal game programme, which we are excited to continue, to help further develop the players’ technical side of their game to ultimately improve players decision making, first touch and 1v1 dominance.
We are delighted to see that girls have started to graduate from our programme and have begun getting experience in open-age football with Cleethorpes Town and Grimsby Borough.
One of our success stories is 16-year-old Kloe Green, who came through from the Premier League Kicks sessions, into the ETC programme and has now made her debut for Grimsby Town Women.
Reflecting on the past year, Centre Manager and Player Development Lead Ben Challen said, “There are many parts of the programme that I am very proud of with both player and staff development being at the core of what we want the ETC to be about.
“We have seen players’ confidence levels grow to the point where they are comfortable in the environment and they are confident within the group setting, which to achieve that within a year is very pleasing and is important to the development of the players both on and off the pitch.
“We are looking forward to continuing our work to see how we can help with the development of the next generation and further progress the women’s and girls’ game in the area.”
Click here to book onto our Premier League Kicks sessions to get involved!
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