Stage 1 Overview- Part 1

Stage 1 of the Gap Year Programme is all done and dusted now. Although extremely excited to be going abroad to Mozambique soon, I’m sad that Stage 1 is over. We have done and learnt so much in Stage 1 that I have decided to do two blog posts telling you a bit about what we have done. Here is Part 1:

On my first day I was very nervous, in fact I think I arrived at the stadium 45 minutes before I needed too, just to make sure I wasn’t late. We then started to meet everyone at the Hub, which is right next to the Emirates stadium. This is the new home of Arsenal In The Community, which was opened by Francis Coquelin and Per Mertesacker just last year, it includes a state of the art 3G training pitch. Many events put on by Arsenal for the local community are based here. We found out this would become our base for the 5 months.

After meeting everyone, I knew that the programme would be as good as I expected it to be. Before we started, my expectations were that most people on the course would have just finished sixth form or college, would be going to UNI the year after and would live close to or in London. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were 13 of us on the August intake of the programme, in this 13 there was :

"1 fun loving American and 1 charismatic Mexican both from Idaho, a passionate Gooner from California, an energetic Palestinian, a dedicated Frenchman, an intelligent and friendly Swiss-man, a caring Cambridge lad, a lovely enthusiastic lady from Essex, a cheeky but talented young man also from Essex, an inspiring Turkish Londoner, a loveable generous lad from Bournemouth, a wise man from Watford and myself!!!!"

What a group ey. As you can imagine this group definitely made for some interesting conversations throughout the course of the programme.

First of all we had our introduction to the programme from Steve Eadon- Head of the Arsenal Gap Programme (and was once on the programme himself). He told us the do’s and don’t, but the main message I got from Steve was about how much fun we were about to have on this programme and that we should do all we can to make the most of this great opportunity. All excited and nervous we went to our first Coach Education session at St Alolysius playing fields.

This is where we had over a month of intensive coach education. Which many of the Gappers have now said looking back, was their favourite part of Stage One. Our coach educator was the brilliant Dean Miller, who has been at Arsenal In The Community a long time now and knows the ins and outs of coaching. These coach education sessions started off with Dean showing us many coaching sessions, focussing a lot on the delivery of the coaching, always giving us countless tips. Then gradually we were given more responsibility, as we had to create and carry out our own sessions to the group. Dean and the rest of the group would then evaluate our sessions.

I remember one session I carried out at St Aloysius and I thought it was dreadful, it didn’t go as planned by any means, but Dean would always stay positive, he found good aspects of the session and then told us how we could improve it for next time. This made for a perfect learning environment.

Playing football day in day out at St Aloysius was so much fun. As we spent so much time together we got to know each other very well and became a very close group. We found out that we had a lot of talented footballers among the group, I must say a fair few competitive characters too. Whenever we were allowed a short match at the end of coach ed, everyone was always up for it to say the least, however we would always shake hands at the end. I remember one goal that ‘dazzling feet’ Mikey scored, a brilliant team goal. For a split moment I think we wondered why we were on a coaches programme and not having a trial for the Arsenal first team. Then on the next play we would do something as surprisingly terrible as the previous play had been surprisingly good and reality would sink in, that it was all just a bit of fun really.

*Note for any future gappers that might be reading this, please enforce the punishment of 10 push ups for a nutmeg as soon as possible in coach ed.

After this time of coach education, we all received our official coaching kit, which we were all delighted about, many selfies were taken. I was very proud to be wearing the official kit, even if it did mean getting the odd remark from a Spurs fan on the tube. Although I have to say I was surprised when a women asked to take a picture with me at Oxford Circus even after I told her I was a coach and didn’t play for Arsenal.

It suddenly started to feel very real, we would soon be going into schools and be representing Arsenal. Following this we received our kitbags, including all the footballs and other equipment we would need in schools.

We were then soon told our coaching partners and our weekly schedule, which for me included coaching at 3 secondary schools and 2 primary schools, as well as 3 coach education sessions still in the Hub. After all of Dean’s advice and preparation, I felt very ready to go into schools and get started….

You can also find this article by following this link : https://jamesbanathy.wordpress.com/

#Stage1