Welcome to Pro Player. Yorkshire’s fastest growing youth football academy. Founded in 2014, Pro Player has been bridging the gap between professional academies and local grassroots football through our extensive range of weekly sessions designed to nurture and develop young players.

Our Academy model is designed to cater for players aged 4-16 and is structured around our Player Performance Pyramid that provides a clear development pathway for all our players, which is bespoke at each performance tier. Our aim is to improve every player within our football academy and help them develop in football and as people.

What makes Pro Player unique is that all of our coaches are current or ex professional footballers who are FA/UEFA qualified, CRB checked, fully insured and first aid certified. In addition to this, many of our coaches have academic qualifications in areas such as sports science or strength and conditioning. We feel this allows us to provide a high standard of coaching that is on a level with any professional football academy. In order to maintain this high level of coaching we have a maximum coach to player ratio of 1:12. This allows each coach to work with a small group of players and ensures that the high standard of players in each age group is maintained.

The academy is based at Kettlethorpe High School, Wakefield, which offers 1st class 3G facilities and premier league standard training equipment that provides the best training & development experience around.

ACADEMY PHILOSOPHY

Pro Player Football Academy is a development programme that aims to produce skilled, confident and creative football players. We are looking to develop every player who attends the academy into outstanding footballers who also have discipline, drive and a professional attitude to succeed. We will use a variety of coaching styles to encourage the players to think independently, or work alongside others to achieve their specific goals. We believe that by coaching in this way, the player will develop a sense of responsibility for their learning that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. We also teach our players how to perform purposeful practice and the important role this plays in their quest for excellence.

IN POSSESSION

Our academy aims to educate players to play a progressive, forward thinking style of football that is based on possession of the ball. At all times our teams will try to play from the back and through the thirds, developing players in a style that makes them competent in managing the ball under pressure.

TECHNICAL COACHING PROGRAMME

At Pro Player Football Academy we believe that individual skill is the foundation that you should build all the other parts of the game around. Therefore, we teach all the players the ‘core skills’, which we define as:

• First touch
• Running with the ball
• 1v1 (attack and defence)
• Ball striking (passing/shooting)

When broken down all of these are teachable components that are underpinned by ball mastery. This is why we place such an importance on high repetition, technical work, which we then increase in difficulty/pressure. This is so the players can move forward from performing skills under no pressure to effectively using skills, at speed under full pressure in the game.