Picture: Elle Dilevski

South Coast Flame’s Girls SAP (GSAP) players were given a treat on Friday night as they trained with the Flame’s senior Womens squads.

The initiative is a first for the Flame and saw the entire female football program from U/10’s all the way through to first grade on the same field, with our youth girls program also training prior to our seniors and GSAP.

This session presented GSAP players with an excellent opportunity to meet our senior players, which the club believes will provide inspiration and aspiration for our juniors to maintain their motivation and strive to become the Flame’s next Womens superstar.

GSAP technical director, Mick Southwell was pleased to see the entire Womens program together on Friday night.

“It’s a wonderful atmosphere having the mixture of our young girls with the first graders and U/20’s. It’s awesome, absolutely wonderful” Southwell said.

“We’re one club. Whether it’s youth girls, first grade or SAP players, we’re all in the same shirt and we play all together”

Womens technical director, Daniel Naumovski says that the initiative was brought to life in hope that it will help form a stronger connection between our youth and senior squads.

“The initiative is to build a connection between the GSAP and the senior component of the club. Now that the pathway is connected, it’s to build support for the Womens team, have little fans come to their games to support the (senior) players and see some of their coaches from GSAP play” Naumovski said.

“It’s just a major link between the pathway that’s been solidified now at the club”

Naumovski hailed the night a success, and believes that the senior players will have a sense of enjoyment from this initiative after seeing the future of our club first-hand.

“(I hope the seniors) get the enjoyment of the young players learning. When they get older, senior football becomes serious and sometimes you forget about the fun aspect of playing.

“I think we will see this (again), it’s been very successful and hopefully we’ll get this happening again throughout the year.

“Obviously we’ll get the feedback from the biggest critics here, the GSAP girls, and see if they’ve enjoyed it and we’ll make it happen again!”

Our GSAP squads are at home this Sunday morning as they take on St George FC. The games for our future superstars kick off from 8:30am.

Meanwhile, our youth girls and senior women are up at Inter Lions this weekend with games starting at 8:20am for our U/14’s, going through all the way to our first grade kicking off at 3pm.