Ms Becky Haigh, Mr Dan Dodge and Mr Daniel Kika
In a brief press conference held last Tuesday afternoon at the Department of Youth & Culture’s Training Room, a review was presented on the work of Tottenham Hotspur Foundation, led by key trainer, Mr. Dan Dodge.
The Tottenham Hotspur Foundation is a United Kingdom-based charity of the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. It has a long established, productive and valued partnership with local communities where there are significant socio-economic challenges as well as aspirations, potential, talent and opportunity to create, deliver and sustain positive change.
For the past three months, this organization has been engaged in working with youth through the sport of football, in particular, assisting them in acquiring necessary life life-skills for their development.
Addressing the conference was Mr. Bren Romney, Director of Sport and Culture: “Tottenham Hotspur team’s first visit in March went exceptionally well,” he stated. The training was quite effective, and the youth that the team interacted with benefitted much. They worked with a number of our young people across the spectrum of our society. They worked with at-risk youth and young people within the prison sector. They also worked with students at the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive school, who were experiencing socio-economic challenges.”
Mr. Romney reported that the Hotspur team also trained persons in the skills of working with youth, conducting a two-day train-the-trainers programme, which was extremely effective and rewarding. He said this training was quite impactful in terms of passing on useful skills to persons who would go back and impart their skills training to the youth, especially at the schools.
Speaking on behalf of the Sports Department Mr. Andre Collins, Director of Sports, said: “We have adopted the “sports for Life Model”. This suggests that at the earliest stages of development we want to introduce children to the fundamentals of life through sport. We do this by ensuring that the children have fun because fun is the number one factor for children staying in sport and continuing to develop.”
He continued: “We must consider that we are not just developing athletes who would want to play in the premier league or ICC cricket, but it is our goal to prepare youngsters for life.”
“Life is a strange thing. “At times one might be going down a certain path in life, when something impacting happens and that path might have to be changed in a different direction. A channel like sport will create a certain discipline to help one deal with such life challenges and obstacles.”
Hotspur team member, Dan Dodger, in relating his impressions on working with Anguilla’s youth said: “Every youth group that we have engaged with should greatly interest in what we endeavoured to impart to them. Some of our methods were a bit different from what they were accustomed to in the sport but they embraced the change and were able to engage.
“There have been some challenges, but we realize that if we are going to change mindsets then we need to embrace those challenges, and that is what we have done. We have worked with the secondary school with the prison on employability, linking our work with sports.
The work of Tottenham Hotspur continues on an ongoing basis as part of the Department of Youth & Culture and the Department of Sports programmes.
Staff Reporter, James R. Harrigan
