How To Find Malawian Wonderkids
I'll let you know when I figure it out.
Good morning! I want to talk about how we scout for new players to join our academy in Malawi at Ascent Soccer.
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Neat Reads
Neat Reads is a segment where I share an article or podcast that interests me and relates to our weekly theme.
This episode from The Training Ground Guru Podcast features Tom Vernon, the CEO of Right to Dream. It’s a great listen from someone who has an incredible understanding of what football recruitment, coaching and development is like.
I featured on the World Football Index podcast hosted by Ben Griffis and Neel Shelat where I talked about everything I do at Ascent Soccer. From coaching and scouting to players stealing my chicken thighs, I cover it all.
I promise at some point I’ll share more written work than podcasts. Or else I’d have to change this section to “Neat Listens'' and that just doesn’t sound great.
Finding Malawian Wonderkids
Malawi has great, young footballers who just need the right opportunity to showcase their ability. At Ascent Soccer, we think we do a pretty good job of giving those players that opportunity in the form of academic scholarships to the United States or European trials/moves.
To find these footballers, we set up local 7v7/8v8 U12 tournaments. I’d say about 500 kids show up to this event - boys and girls.
From there, we select the best talent, invite the talent to “selection day” where we put on a mock training session and perform some academic testing; math and problem solving work.
To find the best talent, we start off by looking for the players who are technically the best. Finding technical excellence is the easy part. From there, coaches/scouts share their findings with each other for the others to watch the player themselves in order to get a more rounded look.
It isn’t outright, but we also look for players who make good decisions but lack technical ability. We can always improve technique, but it’s hard to improve decision making in our environment.
Technical ability and decisions gets you invited to the selection day where we ask the players to participate in academic testing, followed by us asking them to perform a few ball mastery moves, then move into a rondo, then into a 7v7 game.
The whole session is done in English so that we get an idea of the player and their level of education and English understanding. If players don’t speak English but can understand what we’re asking them to do, we can work with that at our academy and homeschool.
From here, we select players based on the academic tests they do before the training and then the training itself.
We invite as many as twelve players to our National Trial in Lilongwe at our HQ for a two week long trial. I’ll write more about the National Trial another day.
Always interested in talking about our recruitment so feel free to reach out!
Coach’s Corner
Coach’s Corner is a segment where I ramble about training this week and answer some questions I get from Substack or Twitter.
Ramblings
Last week was the first week of training after a three week school holiday my players had. It was easily one of the best weeks we’ve had in ages! The level of intensity was excellent and the decisions were great.
It was a very refreshing start to a new term.
I noticed that the younger/smaller players were setting the standard for training for the older/bigger players too. I can’t remember seeing this happen during my time in Malawi.
Younger players were not shy of making tackles. Hard to say for certain but just watching them I could see that the younger ones simply worked very hard - much harder than the older ones and more than normal.
Why did this happen? Something to think about.
Q&A
Should girls teams play against boys teams?
I think context matters. If your girls group is the best in the area for their age group then I don’t see a reason not to. In order for players to improve they need to be challenged. No challenge = no improvement.
Without researching, I want to say that most of the successful female footballers played against boys at one point or another to challenge themselves.
Women’s football has never, until very recently, been given the same level of attention and coaching, creating poor competition as a byproduct.
Thanks Raj for the question!
Questions can be asked directly through Substack (see the button below) or via Twitter DMs!
Exercise of the Week
This is a great exercise for teaching both in and out of possession principles! I’ve found it useful for every age group I’ve worked with from U12 to U19+ players.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading this week!
I’m always interested to hear your thoughts and ideas so please feel free to send me a message on Twitter or leave a comment above in the Q&A section.
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See you next week!
Where to find me:
Medium: https://medium.com/@cameron-herbert
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CamH___
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-herbert-football-coach/