Academy Sports Club is one of the most progressive football outfits in Grand Cayman and they have just added another coach to ensure their international profile increases.
Celebrated Dutchman Roy Wilhelm has been brought over by Academy’s Head of Development, Virgil Seymour. Wilhelm is over to help Academy’s volunteer coaches develop their skills and to assist the club to design a comprehensive coaching policy that will span players aged five to young adult. Another goal of coach Wilhelm’s tenure with Academy is to spot and develop any youngsters he believes has the potential to be placed in Europe
Academy Sports Club believes that the entire football community needs to improve so that Caymanian footballers have the opportunity to develop across the island. As such, Wilhelm will be working with other local club coaches and even the Primary Football League coaches while he is on island.
Last week, Seymour and Wilhelm met up with Roy ‘Huta’ Ebanks in West Bay to jointly conduct a training session at the town hall field. With Wilhelm looking on, there seemed an added intensity in the players’ game.
“The Cayman Islands has a great deal of potential, and I am happy to assist Virgil and other local coaches to develop the talent here,” said Wilhelm. “One of my goals is to provide a professional development assessment of each player for individual training. I would like to learn a lot from these guys because the training methods are different here than in Holland. I’m also keeping my eyes open on good players here because they might be good enough to play in Holland.
“I’m connected with Willem II now. I moved from PSV Eindhoven to Willem II. Why? Because Willem II went bankrupt two years ago and they asked me to help with the rebirth of the club. We did a pretty good job because they got promoted to the Premier division this past season.”
Coach Huta is equally ambitious for his Future players in West Bay. “In Cayman football this is something that I have always advocated,” Huta said.
“We need more international exposure for our kids and we need people who come from a higher developed country, like Holland. When you talk about producing talent, especially for such a small country, Holland has produced many world class players over the years.
“We cannot expect to learn from better coaches than Roy Wilhelm and others like him who travel the world to promote the beautiful game and we’re very fortunate to have him in Cayman. We also have to applaud Academy Sports Club to have the vision to see that to move forward, especially at the youth level, this needs to be done.”
When asked why Academy decided to bring Wilhelm to Cayman and particularly to share his time with other clubs and the football community as a whole, Seymour said: “I took my U15 and U16 players to Holland last spring and Roy was instrumental in setting up the games.
“He has so much knowledge and our players benefited so much from their interactions with him and the international games they played. We played five games in Holland,w winning three, one draw and only one loss.
“Roy was very impressed with our ability and since then we have been in close contact, discussing ways to ensure that Caymanian youth football is headed in the right direction and that local coaches are supported.
“Our local coaches are the ones on the ground, in the sun working with the kids every day after school. We have scouts coming to Cayman frequently because we are producing good players, but we as a community of coaches need to work together and develop ourselves so we can help take our players to the highest level.
“Roy’s a humble man, he loves football and he came to Cayman simply because he knows good talent when he sees it and he believes in what we are doing at Academy.”
Academy has several home grown players already placed in Europe. Cameron Gray, 14, is now a member of the academy at Reading in the English Premier League,
Nathan Borde, 13, recently accepted a development contract at Sheffield United of the Npower League and, of course, most people know that Sebastian Martinez is on a development contract at Swindon Town.
Academy is slowly emerging as a source of consistently solid youth football development and coach Virgil wants to ensure this continues. He also wants fellow youth coaches to develop their skills which will raise levels generally.
“I’ve never believed in keeping resources to myself, so when I approached Academy’s Board of Directors and told them I would like to bring Roy to Cayman for a few months and I would like him to work with all of the Cayman Island Football Association’s youth coaches and the CUC PFL’s coaches as well, they were in full support of the plan,” said Seymour.
“I’ve had meetings with Jeff Webb, President of CIFA and Richard Hew, of CUC’s Primary League about using Roy’s coaching expertise and they are both very excited about the opportunities.
“The best way to ensure our kids have elite development opportunities is to secure a strong and highly competitive local league to play in year after year. International travel and professional level trials are always a goal, but taking one player to Europe benefits one player, whereas elevating the overall level of football locally positively impacts all our youth players.”
Academy Sports Club has youth programmes for players aged from five at their field located on Outpost Road, off Fairbanks Drive in George Town.
For more information contact [email protected]
For more information contact [email protected]
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