Henrik Løber from Nødebo IF
For some time there has been close dialogue between Nødebo School and Nødebo IF’s chairman, Henrik Løber, about creating a collaboration for 0-5 schoolchildren in a football setting. This has now been put in place together with FC Helsingør, as a pilot project for 4 weeks. That is what we are starting with, and then we will evaluate the collaboration from there and hope that we can all see and draw benefits from the collaboration and make it a permanent part of the school. A meeting will be held on 30/4-18 to agree on details and the start-up.
The success criterion is that the children get some exercise so that they are calm in class, and that they look forward to a school day with football and games, and that they gain tools they can use in their daily learning.
Goalkeeping coach Christian Fischer from FCH is one of those involved in the project
– We give them football tasks they have to solve, for example playing together as a team or scoring goals, solving different obstacles through motor skills, as well as working on incorporating e.g. small math tasks into training.
We facilitate their curiosity to solve problems during training (coaching), and help them set short- and long-term performance and process goals, which we work on continuously during the period.
In this way we get them used to breaking a task into parts, as well as gaining the discipline to work towards achieving short- and long-term goals. An example could be that in order to play together as a team they must be able to receive and pass a ball and move intelligently for one another. The learning required is worked through in collaboration with the individual via simple objectives in games and exercises.
A lot of work is done in child psychology around “translations”, which means that children are generally very good at transferring a situation to themselves. We strongly believe that if we can teach them “to learn” on the football pitch, then the children can translate that to school, without having to be confronted with the ever-present “I can't do that” from school, or “why do I have to learn this”.
The project also contains a great deal of health through movement via ball play, as football is a healthy and versatile sport for almost everyone (see, for example, DBU’s Football Fitness project). Socially, it works with well-being alongside others, and the inclusion of others’ abilities, cooperation, communication and much more.
T+ coach René Lybek Hansen is a big fan of the project:
– It is a project that we at FC Helsingør very much look forward to being part of.
We hope that together with our partner club Nødebo IF we can create a good foundation and a good story, and in the long term we hope that this will become such a great success for both children, school and club that together with FC Helsingør’s now 16 partner and parent clubs we can collectively make the children more active. Hopefully, in the longer term, it will also provide a natural transition to grassroots football and thus more members in the local clubs through a naturally arising interest in football.
