by
WIFA conducted its first ever workshop for the Grassroots leaders in the Konkan Region. The workshop was held at cooperage on 6th March 2014. This workshop is being conducted for Grassroots Leaders who have undergone the certification course from FIFA-AIFF-FFA. It was attended by 14 Grassroots leaders from the Mumbai, Thane and Raigad district.
WIFA’s mission is to Make Maharashtra a fully football literate state by 2015. Mr. Souter Vaz, Honorary Secretary of WIFA stated that, ‘We (WIFA) has taken up the challenge to make Maharashtra a fully literate state at the Grassroots and Youth levels. It is our belief that Grassroots Development is the need of the hour and we will work towards providing the same.’
WIFA’s CEO Henry Menezes informed that, ‘WIFA has recently appointed Mr. Kundan Chandra, AFC ‘B’ License holder, FIFA Grassroots Instructor and AIFF ‘D’ License Instructor as the State Development Officer for Maharashtra. We are also intend to recruit six Regional Development Officers who will monitor the development in various regions of Maharashtra under the partnership with FFA-AIFF.’
[imageframe width=265 height=315 pattern=”1″ align=”left” alt=””]http://www.wifa.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/WIFA-Grassroots-logo-jpg1.jpg[/imageframe]
‘We also designed a Grassroots logo which was presented at WIFA’s AGM on Monday 3rd March 2014 in Nagpur. It was well received by all the committee members and they are all supportive and keen to work on the Grassroots program. The program involves plans of producing coaches in every district across Maharashtra. All of whom will be organising ‘grassroots festival day’ every month in all the districts. We also intend to build a community of volunteers, involving school teachers and parents to ensure more and more people are touched with the beautiful game of football.’
Conducting Grassroots leagues which is football with a different format will be WIFA’s next goal. Henry explained, ‘these leagues are conducted in a completely different way where winning and losing doesn’t count. Points are awarded on the skill level of players, style of play, understanding of rules and regulations of the game and fair-play will the criteria to progress in the league.’
Mr. Kundan Chandra the State Development Officer – WIFA, who was excited about the occasion, said ‘It is a great opportunity and responsibility for me to make this project successful. Maharashtra has 14 AFC ‘D’ License instructors, 55 grassroots leaders and about 1000 AFC ‘D’ License coaches and I’m sure all of us will work towards WIFA’s mission to make Maharashtra a fully football literate State.’
Name of the participants in the workshop: Rajkumar Ashappa, Mangesh Desai, Prashant Singh, Suraj Pillai, Chandan Rathod, Albinus Chettiar, Ansari Hussain, Nelson Sebastian, Rajesh Chandra, Ansari Sajid Sabir, Jayesh Solanki, Sydney Alexander, Nagesh Swamy and Anthony Rodrigues
The course was headed by Mr. Kundan Chandra, State Development officer and was assisted by Mr. Arshad Hussain, AFC ‘B’ License holder and AFC ‘D’ License instructor.
The attendees communicated to WIFA that they have already started and have a good strength of 1500 kids who are trained on a regular basis. ‘This is a very heartening to know that we are already attaining such numbers. This is a positive sign for our efforts to promote football at the grassroots level,’ rejoiced Mr. Souter Vaz.
The objective of the workshop was to improve communication and to build a healthy community of leaders who work together to give exposure to maximum number of kids in their vicinity.
Workshop aimed to structure the efforts of all the leaders to have a centralized curriculum delivered throughout the region.
- Weekly Grassroots Coaching
- Grassroots Festival (once every month by every Grassroots leader)
- Grassroots Fair-play league
WIFA.in will soon host a database of all the GR leaders and their area of operation with their tentative list of schedule. ‘This will make it easy for parents who are looking to enrol their kids into footballing activity, to get easy access to information of the footballing activities in their vicinity’, informed Ronak Dalal, Head of marketing and Operations WIFA
WIFA Grassroots logo: The two girls playing football is specially been part of the logo to emphasize the focus on female participation in the program. While the six different colours represent the six regions of Maharashtra viz. Konkan, Desh, Khandesh, Vidhraba, Vidharb and Marathwada.
