The Premier Skills Developing the Coach Educator program, which saw participation from coaches across the country, concluded on Tuesday, December 10 in Mumbai. The course, which was part of Phase 3 of Premier Skills India, ran for a course of five days from December 6-10 at the Reliance Corporate Park in Navi Mumbai. The program saw participation from coaches of nine clubs of the Hero Indian Super League (ISL) as well as four Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) across India.

The coaches participated with the aim of supporting the growth of Indian football by becoming coach educators, delivering new kinds of training courses across the country. This was Premier Skills’ second visit to India this year, having earlier conducted Phase 2 of its program for coaches and referees in May.

The five-day program consisted of a series of theoretical and practical sessions on the intricacies of coach education, facilitated by Premier League coach educator Jez Weeks. On the final day, the participants used the knowledge they gained to conduct a day’s session for 40 new coaches. The coach educators will now be putting their new-found knowledge to practice over the next few months before conducting a community coaching course alongside Premier Skills in Mumbai in April 2019.

Nathaniel D’Costa, Football Development manager at the Forca Goa foundation, made his third appearance at a Premier Skills workshop and shared his major takeaways from the experience, “This is my third phase at Premier Skills. It has been a fabulous experience as always. I’m always excited to come for this event because you get to learn so much, you get to interact with people from all over the country, from different NGOs. You get to learn from fantastic coaches from the local areas as well as from the Premier League.”

Talking about the Coach Educator program, he said, “I am going to go back and have more sessions, hopefully develop more coaches to work within the communities at Goa. The Premier Skills program gives me so much confidence. This kind of confidence gives me the inspiration to go out and implement my ideas and try to make a difference.”

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