Why should you discover SuperKicks? Firstly, it’s an interactive way to have fun playing football and learn the skills you need to play.
We want to make coaching and playing football something that’s available to everybody, whether you’re a player, parent who might not even be involved with a clubs or played football before, and the app helps to do this.
SuperKicks gives you the opportunity to choose how you can experience football, away from a club setting or organised training sessions, whether that’s in the comfort of your own home, the local park, or anywhere really.
It presents challenges which kids can do on their own and is also about sharing, promoting and representing the different values of the England DNA foundation phase, the considerations of our four corner module in developing young players and really brings those to life through different activities.
I believe it can really give players a sense of confidence, so you don’t have to go to a session where there’s 30 or 40 people around you if you prefer not to.
So, if you were to check it out today, what would I recommend to you?
My first advice would be to look at what you’re comfortable with doing yourself. So, if you’re looking at it from a parent’s point of view, there are the different strands like the basics shooting, passing and dribbling. There are different parts of the programme in which parent and child can engage with each other, so I’d want to be getting involved and helping out my child.
And if I was a child, I’d want to do the things which I enjoy the most. There’s an interactive aspect of it too, with challenges and different levels of the games which mean you can get badges. So, from a child’s point of view, I’d be thinking how many badges I can get!
There’s also Kicker, who is the voiceover and animation, and very helpful in telling what each section is about. Kicker really helps guide you through it, from a parent’s point of view, but for a child, just do what you enjoy the most.
With a lot of discussion around how much time youngsters are spending on devices, I would say that this is a great way to have the buy-in and interactivity of apps and the fun part of it, but there’s also the navigating around and making decisions about which activity to do.
It’s the chance to see something and then go and practise them yourself!
The programme will be continuously evolving too. It took quite a while in terms of aligning it with the England DNA, but as we know, football is always changing and expanding.
In my eyes, this is just a snippet of what we can do and it could evolve into something much bigger. A lot is based around the England DNA and that in itself could always develop or change in the future, so we would mould and shape the app from there.
Now it’s ready, we’re looking forward to presenting it to coaches who are actually working with children and also show them the type of games we want them to be doing.
These are things that can ultimately be used across football, so not just in the back garden but for grassroots teams in training and it’s all very exciting.
