Twofold benefit to additional female coaches – Forde

With the development of the women’s game in focus for 2023, Guyana Football Federation (GFF) President Wayne Forde has shared one of the Federation’s strategies for ensuring young girls have a safe space in their Academy Training Centers (ATC).
In November of 2022, the GFF conducted a ‘Women’s- only’ CONCACAF Coaching course, at the time presumed to be geared at ensuring Guyana had more home-grown female coaches. However, in a recent interview with Guyana Times Sport, the GFF President highlighted a small issue that the presence of more female coaches can solve.
“Last year we did our first women’s-only coaching programme, and the strategy behind that is that many of those women who were part of that initial coaching education programme will be assigned to the Academy Training Centers across the regional associations,” Forde divulged.
He went on to explain to this publication, “And the reason why we’re doing that is because we’ve discovered that mothers in particular, parents, have been hesitant to send the girls out to the Academy programme, for obvious reasons.”
As such, Forde went on to opine how producing more female coaches can not only benefit capacity building, but the participation of more female players.
“We felt that not only is having this women’s coaching programme done helped us to expand the women’s coaching capacity, but we believe if we have a female in the academy that is taking care of young girls when they come out on weekends to work with the coaches, that we can see a greater comfort level among the parents to allow the young girls to participate,” Forde explained.
The GFF Boss added, “But I believe the pool of local female coaches will grow over the next couple of years, and we expect to see them featuring more in our national teams and other key developmental activities.”
A total of 24 female coaches were trained last year, with a number of those coaches now participating in the GFF-Blue Water Girls’ U15 development league.