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EL Play works in schools to help children garner multiple benefits of leadership development using football as a medium.
Through a flagship curriculum that combines life skills with football drills, students engage in year-round rigorous training, participate in national leagues and get scouted at games, gaining exposure to sport and competition simultaneously.
Our Play curriculum is built on the four pillars of modern football & grassroots development.
Technical Skill
The technique required to play the sport effectively. These are the building blocks of football and form one of the focal areas of our curriculum. E.g., Ability to execute a pass, a shot or a tackle.
Physical Ability
The capability required to learn technical skills effectively and execute them in a game. Focusing on these abilities is essential to the training program for the kids to ensure maximum impact. E.g., Body coordination, strength, balance, agility, motor skills.
Psycho-Social
The dynamics of a team and how each individual functions within a unit, to achieve the best result on the pitch. This piece focuses on the application of awareness and coordination to read the opponent’s tactics and change gameplay accordingly. E.g., Awareness of a teammate’s run or opponent’s position.
Life-Skills
The individual mindset of a player which allows them to perform to the best of their physical and footballing ability. These are the fundamental life-skills needed to excel in football, school, life and help create a healthy ecosystem for each kid. E.g., Confidence, decision-making, quick-thinking and trust in their teammates.
The program’s pedagogy focuses, first, on the students building a love for the game, and developing their relationship with the ball and being able to manipulate, move it and feel comfortable with it. – Discovery Phase
Once the foundation skills of the game like passing, shooting, ball control and dribbling are established, the program focuses on mastering these technical skills through repetition, practice and understanding how they are used together. Comprehension of this relationship is essential to move forward from the basics. – Skills Acquisition Phase
The third phase of the program is focused on the application of all these football and life-skills in a regular football match, i.e. tactics, positioning, team dynamics and understanding the opposition. – Game Phase
A typical lesson would see students going through 5-6 different session components, starting from a Warm Up, moving to a Fun Activity, Skill Practice, and then Match Practice, with life-skills being taught implicitly and explicitly across all these components. Each session ends with a Cool Down and Team Talk. This session structure provides Coaches with avenues to debrief, discuss, and engage with the students at different times through different methods. This ability to focus on life-skills throughout the session is what sets us apart from conventional football coaching. The Team Talk and Fun Activity components explicitly focus on connecting the game to multiple positive values, traits and concepts, thus strengthening a child’s internalization of the life-skills learned on the pitch.
Each session of 90 minutes is broken down into 6 segments (Warm-up, Fun-Activity and Debrief, Technical Skill, Match Practice, Cool Down, Team Talk) with life-skills being taught implicitly and explicitly. Exemplar session plans and coach actions have been identified and created to assist the coaches in delivering the curriculum content better. It is imperative that the coach focuses on imparting 2-3 values every session that directly correlate to a life-skill as part of our leadership framework.
We believe in the healthy spirit of competition and believe that life-skills really come to bear in a competitive environment.
The coaches are instructed to design a feedback cycle with the children through which they reflect upon the game to highlight essential learnings from the experience.
The program aims to teach children the invaluable lessons of self-awareness, confidence, commitment and grit through football. With a structured curriculum and licensed coaches, EL Play looks to create an alternate reality for these children (both girls and boys), wherein they can freely express themselves and inherently imbibe critical life skills. The program aims to create well-rounded individuals that are not only self-aware but also possess a moral code and can think critically to become productive members of society.
The EL Play program impacts 6061 students across Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Dharwad, and Kumta in India, and students in Battambang, Cambodia, Singapore and Kenya.
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