Fiorentina Coaching Course Draws Roughly 200
With nearly 200 coaches in attendance at its latest event, NorCal Premier Soccer again showed its commitment to continued education this past weekend when it hosted the latest version of its Fiorentina Coaching Course at Las Positas College in Livermore.
Drawing from a partnership that has been active for many years, Fiorentina Youth Director, Professor Vincenzo Vergine again visited Northern California to pass his knowledge onto eager learners.
Founded in 1926, ACF Fiorentina are two-time winners of Serie A, the top division in Italian Soccer, and boast one of the best youth development systems in all of Europe.
It’s that system that was on display during the two-day course, which featured several classroom lectures from Vergine, as well as practical field sessions led by NorCal’s Player Development Program staff.
The course focused mostly on the physical development aspect of youth players, something that NorCal was on the cutting edge of implementing to the soccer scene roughly a decade ago when NorCal began to develop a relationship with Serie A club ACF Fiorentina.
And given the regularity of the event — NorCal and Fiorentina put it on almost every year — those who had taken the previous basic course were given the opportunity to build on their knowledge with an advanced course.
“One thing that stood out for me this year would have to be talking about the teta, implementing the technical, the tactical, the mental, as well as the physical aspects of the game,” said Ugo Uche of Woodside Soccer Club. “In the entry level course, we learned more about the coordination abilities and teaching the kids the balance, the agility, the jumping, the catching, the summersaults, the tumbling.”
“I started implementing that into my teams in Woodside and it showed some improvement with the coordination and the movement and now this course, I’m starting to learn more about how to maybe take it to the next level and instead of just looking at the psychomotricity levels of development, now how do we develop that into the game of soccer so moving off the ball, opening up when you’re receiving a pass, the mobility in order to get open and create space and time in order to effectively make the right decisions on the field,” Uche added.
After the course concluded, staff members from Fiorentina stayed in the Bay Area and attended NorCal Premier Soccer’s Annual General Meeting, where they announced a new partnership with NorCal that would eventually see women from this region earning contracts with the Serie A club, another way that this relationship will continue to grow.
While this was one of NorCal’s first coaching education opportunities in 2019, it was nowhere near its last. Stay tuned for more information regarding such events.
