Twenty five coaches receive CAF B Licence certificates

Twenty-five (25) South African coaches have been awarded their CAF B Licence certificates – this is currently CAF’s highest coaching qualification. The graduation award ceremony was held in Pretoria on Thursday, 12 May 2011.

The course is the brainchild of FIFA and CAF who worked together on the module, with CAF handing out accreditation to the participants. The course took place last year in the south of Johannesburg.

Absa Premiership coaches, assistant coaches as well as National team coaches made up the composition of the participants. Among them was Bafana Bafana head coach Pitso Mosimane, Under 23 coach Shakes Mashaba, Under 17 men’s coach Solly Luvhengo and Under 20 women’s team coach Sheryl Botes. The PSL coaches included Boebie Solomons (Santos), Steve Khompela (Free States Stars), Andries Mpondo (Moroka Swallows development team) and Roger de Sa (Bidvest Wits).

“This is a good step in fighting for development in our country. We can never have development if we don’t have the personnel to work with development. What we are witnessing here today is a step in the right direction. It’s important to train as many people as possible so we can spread them around the country to head up development in even far flung areas. This is the correct starting place,” said SAFA Technical Director Serame Letsoaka.

Letsoaka added that they are in the process of putting together a group to take part in the next level, the CAF A Licence. The idea is to get as many coaches as possible, but only the best will be picked for the course. The course is earmarked for June 2011. The SAFA TD had a word of advice to the 25 recipients.

“We are not training our coaches to hang certificates on the walls and not help our communities. We want our coaches to assist everywhere development is lacking. We encourage all the coaches to take initiatives and help our football to grow with your help, we can fast track the process of development,” added Letsoaka.

SAFA President Kirsten Nematandani was on hand to award the certificates.

“It is important to empower our coaches at all levels of our football structures. This development phase will improve our game immensely and also assist us to accomplish our objective of becoming the number one country on the continent, a feat we achieved back in 1996 and set our plans in motion to qualify for the France and Korea/ Japan FIFA World Cups in 1998 and 2002 respectively. It is a fact that we cannot talk about football development when we don’t have the personnel to do just that, so this is a great step forward in getting our development structures in place,” said Nematandani.

Here are the participants that received certificates: