The FFA's National training Centre Challenge began a series of national football tournaments, designed to showcase our talented Footballers at age. The players are all teenagers (15-17 years of age). The FFA's National Junior Championships have begun at the Under 13 age group and will continue across the age groups throughout the year. The sound technical and attitudinal development of teenage football players is crucial to the development of the game in Australia.
Our best Coaches (Club or representative) should be tasked with the development of the junior / youth players.
The best guides the best to be the best!
It is easily the most rewarding sphere of Football coaching. It is too often left to find its own way forward, particularly at Club level, usually by well intentioned parents who volunteer simply because no one else is available.
So if we are in the crucial business of developing junior players (and an enromous amount goes on before the Under 13 age group), we should have some better understanding of human development at these age groups. Some elementary understanding / awareness of the development of the human brain is so importnat for us as Coaches of junior football players. It may help us manage the diversity of players that present each season at age.
There would not be one coaching course that does not see participants speak about some aspect of player development that revolves around "Behaviour and Atittude" of some players - talented or otherwise at age. So with that in "mind" lets take a quick three part trip through "The Teenage Brain". The presenter is:
Frances E. Jensen, MD, senior assistant in Neurology at Children's Hospital Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School, presents and translates the most up-to-date research on the teen brain which she shares with parents, teachers and teens during her presentation, "Teen Brain 101"