Great Open Day for Young Widwez
While all eyes were on the new first-team coach of Widzew Łódź, the Heart of Łódź hosted the Young Widzew Open Day, which attracted several hundred children and their parents to the pitch of the stadium at Piłsudskiego.
In fact around 250 young football adepts registered for the recruitment event of the youngest structure operating within Widzew. The confusion at the helm of the first team cannot cover up the success of the Open Day, especially as organising the event required a lot of effort from many coaches.
Young Widzew is the vestibule of the Widzew Academy. It brings together teams with both five- and eleven-year-olds. The idea is to create a number of training locations within housing estates and around Łódź to enable everyone to train as close to home as possible. The number of Young Widzew training bases are increasing fast, and soon they hope to be the largest football school in the entire province.
Most of the participants at Tuesday’s Open Day came to Young Widzew for the first time. Recruitment, as the name suggests, gives them the chance to join the training structures of the red-white-red.
”Of course, I would like all of those present today to stay with us permanently in the Heart of Łódź. This requires a lot of work on our part, creating the right conditions in individual centres, helping the coaches who run classes there. The Open Day is only the beginning of our hard work, although I admit that the smiles of all the children today are a huge gratification for us and proof that it is worth organising such large initiatives.”
Wojciech Pawłowski, coordinator of the Young Widzew project
The smiles were indeed plentiful – you could see a smiling face at every turn. The Open Day training sessions were organised by age group, so four-year-olds did more of simple and basic football exercises, while the more disciplined football adepts performed specific exercises instructed by the coaches.
”Yes, today we have both four-year-old and eleven-year-old children here. By taking care of each group and adjusting the classes to the needs and specifics of their age, we show both the children and the parents that we have a very professional approach to training. It is about making sure that everyone feels taken seriously today, that they are properly looked after and that, despite the massiveness of the event, everyone takes away a good memory from it. We are presenting our range live and, in three hours, we want to show just how much we can offer.”
Wojciech Pawłowski
The turf of the stadium on Piłsudskiego Avenue was divided into a number of smaller fields, which housed the individual training groups and their respective coaches. At any one time, almost one and a half hundred children were performing completely different exercises, which could have led the watching parents to go blind. – ‘I think I see my son there, I don’t know… He’s a living silver, so it’s a miracle he’s listening to anyone here anyway,’ said one mum sitting in the stands of the Heart of Lodz. – He was very excited to play in a big stadium since the morning, she added.
Excitement is perhaps the key word to succinctly describe the Young Widzew Open Day. The imaginative stands of the Heart of Lodz, the multitude of participants and youth football, even children’s football, reigned supreme at Pilsudskiego Street for three whole hours.
