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Youth football expert highlights 'biggest challenge' of Kinetic Academy
We’re delighted to welcome the founder of Kinetic Academy Harry Hudson as our exclusive columnist. Each week the youth football expert will be giving his views on the biggest talking points on wonderkids across the UK…
Footballers in this day and age are under huge pressure to perform on the pitch and succeed off it which Kinetic Academy founder Harry Hudson knows well.
The former Glebe FC manager in non-league football set up the foundation straight out of university to try and help young people in South London make their football dreams a reality.
Since then, 58 players have graduated from the Kinetic Academy to earn themselves a professional contract in the English leagues and some have even gone to the United States of America to play university football.
But one of the toughest tests Hudson and his charity face is balancing the football dream they all share and the need to remain disciplined in school and life in general.
“It’s probably the biggest challenge we have,” Hudson said exclusively to The Football Wonderkids. “The most important thing is that they have the passion for football.
“If you don’t turn up to school or you’re late to school in the morning or you don’t hand in your work on time, you don’t train and that’s what the kids live for.
“If you’re not training and playing you’re not going to be a footballer.
“That method, in the initial stage, does work for the majority of young people but there’s always a few that have unresolved trauma in their past.
“They will be going through things away from football that makes that model not sustainable in the long term and for those individuals, it’s all about understanding that trauma and helping them through it.
“It’s not as black and white as ‘you turn up late, you don’t train’. You have to understand the why first because there could be a very good reason.”
The Kinetic Academy are set to play in the Under-19s Alliance League for the 2022-23 season having reached an agreement with Corinthian Casuals to field a joint side.
In other Kinetic Academy news, Hudson has been waxing lyrical about the talent on show at Tottenham Hotspur and the flair the current crop of youth players possess.