Volunteers and young leaders of "Open Football Festivals" completed their training at the UAF

Within the framework of the Ukrainian Football Association and regional associations' project "Open Football Festivals," volunteers from regions of Ukraine underwent training in Kyiv under the donor program "Restoration and Resilience Led by Youth in Ukraine."

Volunteers and young leaders of "Open Football Festivals" completed their training at the UAF

Photo: Dan Balashov

The educational component of the project for volunteers and young leaders covered two seminars over the week. Initially, representatives from Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhya, Kyiv, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Kharkiv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv regions and Kyiv city participated. Following them were representatives from Dnipropetrovsk, Zakarpattia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Ternopil, and Khmelnytskyi regions.

The program was presented by representatives of the UAF Denis Sukhoruk, Yevheniy Stolitenko, Igor Yamborko, Oleksandr Kosevych, Dmytro Chulanov and project lead experts Lianna Kopilova, Vitalii Titaryk, Serhiy Chesheyko, Oleksiy Khachan, Olena Timoshenko, Viktoriia Biletska and others.

The sessions took place both in interactive seminar format as well as on the field at the synthetic pitch of the Training Complex of the UAF for preparing youth and junior teams.

The main theme of all sessions was the program of youth leadership. Organizers from communities and young leaders presented their initial results of implementing the project in their regions, discussed inclusive teaching methods for different groups of children, innovative tools for teaching football, issues of football management as a foundation for child development, working with parents as partners in development, fundraising and media coverage of mass football projects in communities.

Participants were also presented with a new electronic methodological football program developed in the Shakhtar Social project.

Participants learned how to plan the conduct of football festivals and their own mini-projects within youth football hubs in regions, formed a vision for developing such a hub in their community. Additionally, they participated in practical sessions on football games and exercises on technique, development, and interaction, as well as independently conducted fragments of practical lessons that they wanted to share with other participants.

Upon completion of the seminars, football volunteers received certificates for leaders of mass football from the head of the department of football development at UAF Bohdan Hordynyuk, head of the Committee on Mass Football at UAF and UEFA Mass Football Commission member Oleksandr Kadynkiv, and head of the amateur and mass football department at UAF Denis Sukhoruk.