Sports Management Q2 2012 - Leisure Opportunities

The centre will house an indoor sports hall,tennis courts, sand pits, sand rehabilitationlanes, a hydrotherapy suite, strength andconditioning gyms and a biomechanics areaDAVID SHEEPSHANKS: CHAIRWhen appointedin 2008, mymain role wasto create a financially sustainablebusiness brandto bring this long-standingproject to fruition.I’ve been the chief crusader,but backed up by a first-class team.Following consultation with the marketplaceto build a financially sustainablebusiness plan, there was common agreementthat the clubs wanted to keepcontrol of the players’ education withintheir training academies, but there was adefinite need for a centre that could educateeveryone else involved with the game.The FA already has a successful trainingbusiness, FA Learning, which ran 73courses last year, mainly Level One toLevel Five coach education courses, buta plethora of others as well. St George’sPark will build on that effective platform,by developing an educational hub forEnglish football with courses in refereeing,leadership training, football andsports administration and sports marketing– among others.Our national game will benefitenormously from this focus on coacheducation and leadership training – takingmanagement and coaching to a newlevel. If we want to match the best in theworld – which we’re plainly not today –we need to start with better coaches.Better coaches mean better players,in the long run. This is a long-termproject, concerned with team development,rather than player development.Gargantuan amounts have been investedin wages, stadia and club academies, butdisproportionately little in education andteaching our teachers. So this project isabout raising quality and quantity.Our consultation and research, whichinvolved looking at other national centresIf we want to match the bestin the world, we need tostart with better coachesand other sports, especially golf, showedthere was a need for investing in educationfor the game, particularly coaching.We want homegrown coaches fromSt George’s Park to be as sought afteras graduates from Oxford, Cambridgeand Harvard. We want to see St George’smanagers leading domestic and internationalteams, so we can stop our relianceon recruiting from overseas for the toppositions. We also want to raise the profileof coaching as a profession, makingsure coaches are properly remuneratedand have career pathways.This will create a training infrastructurefor English teams. There’s no silver bulletfor the ills of English football, but I believein building on strengths, investing inteachers and creating a CPD ethos.The centre will house 11 full-size,external, floodlit, undersoil-heatedpitches for coaching all age groupsALAN FERGUSON: HEAD GROUNDSMANThis will be one ofthe best facilitiesin the worldfor maintenance andchoice of pitches. Withthe range of surfaces wehave at St George’s Park,we will be able to replicateany playing surface that the Englandteam will ever have to play on.There are four Desso GrassMasterpitches (100 per cent natural grasswith synthetic grass fibres), including areplica Wembley pitch; four fibresandpitches, with a lesser reinforced system;five natural surfaces, which have noreinforcement, and two state-of-theartsynthetic pitches. All of them givedifferences in pace, hardness andbounce of the ball.This is a great asset to the country because,apart from the top six or sevenPremier League clubs, most clubs justhave one pitch, so players don’t get theexperience of trying different surfaces.We are 40 minutes from 14 major soccervenues and have a superb hotel andmedical support, so we are expecting tobe constantly busy. We will be involvedwith any new standards which the FApasses regarding pitches, as well as testingequipment.Issue 2 2012 © cybertrek 2012 Read Sports Management online sportsmanagement.co.uk/digital 29